Bitcoin Forum

My message to MtGox support:


10 days later this is their response to my request:


Sadly this is my first ever purchase using bitcoins.  It is disappointing.  The 11 bitcoins was 2/3 payment on a motherboard bought on this forum.  The 5.9 bitcoins that are at that address are the 1/3 payment I sent myself when the motherboard arrived in the mail.  I was able to send bitcoins to that address.  Why can't MtGox.

How many thousands of blocks does it take for a MtGox withdrawal to show up in a block?

Hello Samuel,

It appears that the bitcoins have already been deposited to your account.  However, if you still experience any further difficulties with this issue, please feel free to contact us and we will look into it for you. 

The transfer in question is confirmed as having already been processed and credited to recipient's account as of Fri 13 Jan 2012 07:12:25 PM JST. Please be aware that transfer to 1JcMWSggw3mnFanp81HMeBCtKyFJwJ253S is an intra transfer. When BTC is sent to another Mt.Gox address, the transfer is done instantly and will not appear on the BTC network.

First I should say that the recipient is not me it is the person I bought the board from.  So it is his word that the bitcoins did not show up at his address.

How does this work?  Does MtGox have their own block chain?  When I sent to that address did it appear in MtGox's block chain but not the one the real world uses?  When I sent 5.9 BTC to that same address and it appeared is that an address in a different block chain?  Will that 11.1 BTC never show up in the Satoshi block chain?

Where should the recipient look to find his bitcoins?  Does he posses them?  Can he spend them?  Have I successfully paid for the board?

If MtGox has their own block chain can I see it?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes then that is just another complication to bitcoins that will make it's wider acceptance difficult.

Sam

The way it works is this:

Mt Gox has a wallet
each person owns a portion of this wallet and mtgox keeps track of how much each person owns
if you send btc to another mtgox user they just update their system to say you own a little less of it and the user your sending it to owns a little more now for example:

you and 2 other friends go in together and own 1 wallet

bob owns 5 btc in that wallet

matt owns 10 btc

sara owns 30 btc in that wallet

sara trades bob something for 10btc

now bob owns 15
matt owns 10
and sara owns 20

but you never actually sent out a transaction because all the bitcoins were held in one wallet which means a transaction never happened in the block chain

You got scammed?  Or maybe they just mistakenly gave you their mtgox deposit address instead of a receiving address from their personal wallet.

Well I did receive the board and it works very nicely.  The seller is waiting patiently for his missing bitcoins.  Not very scam like.

Sam

Ahh, ok.  I was thinking maybe the seller intentionally used a mtgox address knowing that you were going to pay from mtgox, so that he could point to the blockchain and demand that you pay him a second time.

He needs to check on that address that he told you to pay to.  If that is his deposit address at mtgox, he should see the transfer there already.  If he accidentally gave you someone else's mtgox deposit address, he needs to figure out who that someone else is, and ask them nicely if they could forward the misdirected payment back to him.

I'm thinking that mtgox won't tell you anything about the account that has that address, but if you ask them very nicely, they may be able to confirm if the account info matches the other information you know about the seller.  Or maybe they can contact the account holder for you.

I'd point the seller to this thread and ask them to contact MtGox support. However, my guess is that the seller is just watching a Blockchain site and is not actually logging in to MtGox to check. (if they use a Yubikey, this is quite possible, since logging in is a bit more of a hassle)

These two statements of MtGox support are inconsistent. "The transaction will appear on the block chain." or "the transaction will not appear on the block chain".

Plus the seller didn't give me a MtGox address he just gave me an address.  He didn't know I was going to use MtGox to send the bitcoins.  The seller claims to have not recieved the 11.1 bitcoins that I sent from MtGox but did receive the 5.9 bitcoins I sent from my wallet.

MtGox: what is really happening?  If I send bitcoins from my MtGox account there is a promise that the bitcoins will actually be sent.  It doesn't appear to be that way.

That's because, likely due to lack of training, the first statement is wrong.

That doesn't mean that he didn't give you a MtGox address.

Likely because he's not logging into his MtGox account to verify this. Honestly, I would love it if the seller started posting here instead of you, because your obligation is complete.

They are sent. There's just no promise that the transfer will be sent to the blockchain if it can be processed internally at MtGox.

The internal sending mechanism works. I've tested it.