Bitcoin Forum

I understand Mt. Gox is mindful of security these days, and that a "verified" account (one where the owner has sent in a utility bill, etc.) carries less risk than an unverified one.

The verified account should have higher withdrawal limits. Fine. No problem there.

But for the unverified accounts, why does Mt. Gox allow only 1/4 as much withdrawal in BTC as they allow in US dollars?
For the unverified, risky, "could be a hacker for all we know" accounts, they could pull out $1000 in USD per day -- which is apparently a balance between convenience and risk.

SO WHY CAN THEY WITHDRAW ONLY $250 worth of BTC every day?  

The actual amount is 100 BTC -- but Helllloooo McFly, BTC aren't 10 bucks anymore! Try $2.50, and they've been around $3 for a long, long time.

I'm not saying Mt. Gox needs to update their withdrawal amount on a daily basis -- but come on!  How about whenever there's a major sea change in the price of Bitcoin? Maybe once a month?

I don't think I'm nitpicking here. $250 is not enough to buy much in BTC. Who wants to spend 3 days withdrawing BTC so they can buy something with it? Is Mt. Gox TRYING to kill Bitcoin? It doesn't even make sense.

I have no idea why they don't have a floating limit.
If someone's cash limit is $1K couldn't the exchange calculate a BTC limit automatically based on weighted average of say last 30 days (~$3) which would be ~350 coins?

I guess the larger issue is don't keep your coins @ Mt.Gox except those you are converting to USD.

It says quite a lot about the amateurism of Bitcoin that the largest (and essentially only real) exchange has such tiny withdrawal limits.  Any business that does more than $1000/day in gross sales has yet another disincentive to try out Bitcoin, since their money will be essentially held hostage by the exchange for fear of crashing the price.  And if another 30% dip in value occurs while you're trying to cash out, well, tough titties.

Yes, whoever hacked Mt. Gox TRULY SUCCEEDED in destroying Bitcoin, it would seem. They forced Mt. Gox to become paranoid, to the point that most businesses wouldn't be able to put up with the hoops and restrictions -- like I said, they destroyed Bitcoin.

Just like 9/11 -- if we become a freaking police state, with no personal freedoms, checkpoints everywhere, super-inconvenient air travel, constant monitoring of the populace -- sure, those "camel jockeys" won't be crashing another plane any time soon, but then you have to ask yourself WHO WON? They did, obviously. If America has to destroy herself to be safe, then the so-called terrorists have won. Who doesn't realize that? (Of course, the whole "Muslims did it" theory is a bunch of hogwash, but I digress)

Destroying Bitcoin as a viable currency is much, much worse than what the hackers did to Mt. Gox several months ago. That only affected a few people, and the financial effect of their hack has long since passed. But forcing Mt. Gox to become full-fledged paranoid? THAT is killing Bitcoin, affecting ALL users, on a DAILY basis.

This limit was set when the price was higher, just like the transaction fees (I don't see anyone complaining about cheap fees though).

Anyway, I also think that it doesn't make much sense. One simple option I would like MtGox to have in order to protect against some attacks is confirmation by email on withdrawals.

How exactly is a % based fee cheaper now?

Because with the same amount of money you move a lot more coins now that prices went down. The fee percentage is based on your trading volume in BTC.

Um if the coins are worth less, then it takes more coins to equal the same transaction value.

It would be like saying your boss is going to give you a pay raise by paying you in $10 bills instead of $100 bills.  You get 10x as many pieces of paper so you must be getting paid more right?

So, to clarify --

If someone hacked my account, they couldn't withdraw more than 100 BTC or $250 per day. (Yay!)
But they could just sell my few hundred BTC -- which requires no special verification -- and withdraw the whole USD amount of $1000 in one day (Oops!)

So how is restricting BTC to $250/day helping with security?

That's like putting 5 deadbolts on one door, while having another door (leading to the same room) standing wide open.

In conclusion, there's NOTHING Mt. Gox could say that would excuse this ridiculous policy.

The transaction volume is in Bitcoins. The fees were announced on August 24th (https://support.mtgox.com/entries/20388551-lowered-trade-fees-and-volume-discounts) when bitcoins were worth $10. If you traded $5000 per month in August, you had 0.5% fees (500 coins). Right now you will get 0.3% fees for moving the same $5000 per month (10000 coins).

I gotcha now.  Didn't realize the fee varies based on BTC volume. 

The bitcoin withdrawal limit has nothing to do with bitcoin network fees.

It's clearly a counter measure to avoid what happened in June.

One  reason I could think off, is that withdraws in US$ would be traceable, or even reversible in the case of fraud, but in BTCs thats respectively very difficult and impossible.

More difficult and impossible than when 100 BTC was worth $1000? Mt. Gox didn't seem to hold that position back when BTC were $10 each, and the withdrawal limits were at parity (1 to 1).

You act as if they always considered BTC withdrawals more risky than USD withdrawals. If that were so, they wouldn't have EVER set a similar withdrawal limit for BTC & USD. But they did.

Have you contacted them and asked to increase your limit? For most people these limits would be plenty and provide some security. I got a daily cash limit on my bankcard thats not much higher on regular ATMs, if I want more I just have to make a call or go to my banks selfbank ATM.
But for a business, Im sure they will increase those limits on demand.

You can raise the cash limit but not BTC limit (or at least you couldn't 3 months ago).

just ran up against this 100 Btc limit today when I wished to do an arbitrage sell on another exchange & hence lost the opportunity, have now uploaded pics of ID & utility bill today for verified much larger withdrawals - will post how long this takes & any hiccups, also really what's the point for Mt.Gox as when withdrawing in Btc any random uploaded stuff would do & probably for $ etc too - it's not like they can confirm any photo of an ID or address is actually tied to any specific account holder unless they're the CIA or something, so it's just an inconvenience & breach of privacy for normal users & np to spoof for bad guys just like 99% of these restrictions that companies cook up in the name of security unless I've missed something here, real security would be offering to let you permanently set an irrevocable dedicated Bitcoin address that you can only W/D to for high amounts & the same for $ etc W/Ds, my favourite is bullionvault.com where funds can only be W/D to the exact same unique bank account that they were originally funded from

It took them about 4 weeks to tell me a phone bill wasn't good enough (with my id) as proof when I requested a limit increase.  I sent them my ID again with utility bill about 4 weeks ago and haven't heard anything back yet.  Their response times are pretty poor.

There is a very simple answer to that.
MtGox is building a fractional reserve, trying to make more money on the money they already have.
They are very probably investing money of their users using external entities. It's a no-brainer.



No, they are slowly killing themselves.
It's good for bitcoin, we need more serious exchanges and less crappy exchanges.

It is possible to actually create a totally hardened, hack-free exchange without crazy withdrawal limits, but not everybody is competent enough for the job.

MtGox will be replaced by better exchanges - sooner or later. It's called free farket.

I think people using an MtGox yubikey, should be allowed to withdraw more.

100btc cap is indeed ridiculously low.

We need better exchange replace MtGox as THE exchange.
If I was trading I'd give cryptoxchange a try, really nice UI / features.

Of course this limits do not apply to "Mr. Manipulator"

Mark will increase your btc withdrawal limits to whatever you wish it to be.  you just have to ask him and be verified.

According to some members, even jumping through the hoops won't solve the problem.

bitcoin is a great idea as long as you don't run out of other people's bitcoins.   ;D

Why not update daily? It's completely trivial to do so with a bit of code.

well finally verified 7 hours ago, it took 3 days as the first scan of my passport was rejected for no good reason (banks find it fine) then multiple attempts to upload a high res photo trying different file sizes of it didn't work all day yesterday due the some MtGox glitch finally with an apology & no explanation I received an email that my account had been verified today. Incidentally a couple of days ago I couldn't even withdraw the daily limit of 100 BTC due to an erroneous error message that kept reporting an invalid address to send to when it was not, just like as in the past one needs an appreciation of farce & a strong sense of humour when dealing with the Gox

Edit to add, the utility bill that I uploaded was my land line phone/Internet bill & was accepted so I assume the person above who's wasn't may have tried to use a mobile/cell phone bill perhaps?

You can exchange as much as you like, just not withdraw. So your objection of the price taking a dip is BS.

You can surely talk to MagicalTux about raising your individual limits.

So was your BTC limit raised?  If so do you mind sharing how much or what was the max limit they would allow?

Note that there are withdrawal limits. Here is the detail of your limits:

You can still withdraw up to 900.00000000 BTC provided you have enough on your account (your limit is 1,000.00000000 BTC per 24 hours )
You can still withdraw up to $10,000.00000 provided you have enough on your account (your limit is $10,000.00000 per 24 hours and $50,000.00000 per 30 days)

I haven't tried to talk with MagicalTux about raising my individual limits as molecular keeps suggesting because I don't know how or care to spend the time to find out, I communicate with & through the MtGox web site & am happy with the present limit though really don't see why there should be one at all when I use an MtGox Yubi key to log in & again secondary Yubi key long press of it to initiate a withdrawl (when I logged in just now to C&P the updated W/D limits I'm sure the random code that the Yubi generated for this that flashes past started with 'lmao...'  it's probably mocking me)