Bitcoin Forum

I was watching this today, and I'm sure many of you as well.
MtGox was processing transactions - someone was buying tons on bitcoins, so obviously there were many database records to process - but the tickers (the so-called API) was not updated in the realtime!
It was like showing 5.60 while the price was already at 6 - for minutes, not seconds.
It's just not right.
If someone had an insight info into the actual ticker - is was a fraud.
And I know some people who did :)
So I can only hope that this was an accident.
Though, it's still wrong.
Dont you think?

THis has happened in the past where MtGox auto-halts trading in the event of a large market movement to avoid a repeat of what happened last June.

yes, but this time the trading was not halted. it was perfectly going on - the price was changing on the market and the transactions were being processed. people were byuing and selling bitcoins for a price that was much, much different from the actual ticker price.
because the tickers were not being updated - for minutes!
and since during these minutes there was such a big spike, it could have been a fraud :)
dont you think?

i mean, and i know about programming, how hard is it to make sure that the ticker price always represents the latest price?
it's not a lot of data to send through.
so either some developer really screwed it up badly - or it was a fraud :)
is there a third option?

There seems to be two sets of data, realtime api and poll api and there was a mismatch between the two.

According to Mt. Gox's Vol/Price graph, everything seems to be normal for today:

http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/2341/mtgox212012.png (http://img215.imageshack.us/img215/2341/mtgox212012.png)

I'm guessing this chart has the lowest priority, so they will update it in a few hours or so :)

That's certainly the last time I'm using their charts as an indicator. At least their trade price is updated.

Thanks for clearing this up. I was already considering moving my MtGox funds to bitcioinica, and I thought there was something funky going on. No way I'm using gox now.

out of the frying pan and into the fire, isn't it?

Yeah, and the worst part is that MtGox declares the better one (realtime) to be "beta" so they don't have to support it if it doesn't work for some users. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=61765.msg723349#msg723349)  Very frustrating.

They need to lift the 10-second-caching rule on the polling API until the streaming API is considered stable.  If that means buying more servers, so be it.

I got caught up in this. A little annoying although I'm glad that this time round my failed API-related trades weren't too significant in volume during this time.

I watched the whole thing live.
I was seeing the spike in mtgoxlive, tried to get better positions in my mtgox account.
then mtgox went down, and I was like blind. I wasnt sure the last data I had seen in goxlive was accurate, and mtgox itself didnt show it correctly.
then, when mtgoxlive came back, I saw the spike to 6.20, which gradually was removed from goxlive(for a short time the high dropped down to 5.74, the spike was purged from the price history.

While I acknowledge mtgox taking security measures to prevent loss, this situation is kind of hard for users. I mean, you sit ducks there, being blind during a major market event. But I wont blame gox this time.

Then does anyone have recommendation for a site with a real time ticker that's more accurate?

For those who are good at PHP development, I have a suggestion, from what you're all saying, the orderbook when accessed through the main site will always be up to date.

It wont be hard to set your session timeout to the max and use some sort of Curl script with a post to send your login details and maintain an actively connected session through the usual page. You can then get your script to poll every X seconds to retrieve the prices out of the correct positions on the page (cut it out using some regex etc...).

If we get no response from Mtgox, when I get some time, I'll code this up and share it. Any suggestions from other devs would be good.

Ive seen it handfuls of times before as well.  I blame MtGox 100%