Bitcoin Forum

EDITED: No trade was registered for many many hours some time. MTGOX was down and is up again.
What happened is now the question.

Looks like their trade engine is. Other exchanges are unaffected on bitcoincharts, while for MtGox USD, EUR and GBP there have been no trades for a while.

I guess they are not really interested in making money. ;D

MTSOCKS is still up.

http://mtsocks.com

still no change

well, time to enjoy my newly arrived Bitcoin Magazine :D

still nothing!

or have i missed any anouncements?

No trades in the past 3.5 hours....

It looks like orders are still being placed --> Btccharts.com
That way one can estimate which way it will go after ther trade engine comes back up.

-edit- although I just tried (both mtgox.com and classic.mtgox.com) and no order could be placed

Is anyone else seeing MtGox's reported volume decreasing for the last few hours or so? It used to be ~33000 BTC, now it's ~26000 BTC and still dropping (sit on the frontpage for a few minutes, and watch the ticker at the top).

Am I being stupid and just missing something, or..?

I believe thats volume for a 24h period, and since no trades are taking place, the volume for this 24 hour period is decreasing

So, me being stupid: confirmed.

Thanks for the info.

It's been dead for hours already.
The last trade was at 13:42:28 UTC

This could be a good sign...

Imagine if they got hacked again, but this time their countermeasures kicked in and froze trading until they get everything sorted out.

Of course, if I were mt.gox I would not advertise this... or would I?...

Where's the statement of MtGox?
that sucks!

May just be canceling orders!

Some of the chatty Cathy's over on BTC-e said they were able to pull BTC out of gox since this started, andI doubt cash would be the same story.

I can place an ask order, but it just stays pending...
And it doesn't seem to be affecting the market depth data.

If you mean orderbook volume, it is really droped bitcoin-analytics.com (http://bitcoin-analytics.com)
from 330k USD to 230k USD and also interesting that orderbook price is changing over time  in opposite direction.
Looks really that orders are cancelled gradually one by one. from both bids and asks sides.

http://i49.tinypic.com/2daf139.png

Let me put some oil in the fire:

gentlemen - you are seeing mtgox folding

Could be this, could be just some technical issue. The thing with gox is: you never know whether you are being goxed or foxed.

The best strategy here IMO is to not play. It is really fun to be just an observer. And I am speaking from experience here. It is  much less fun watching Bitcoinica debacle because Bitcoin Magazine has slightly more than 1000$ in limbo there.

the freenode chat has nothing to report either besides that tux does not pick up his phone.
I quote from freenode:

<  neofutur> quotation is suspended for more than 2 hours now, no official word until now, probably a technical problem
[19:51] <neofutur> MT dont answer the phone until now
[19:52] <neofutur> I keep trying to contact him

A similar thing happened last week at around the same time

I'm thankful I just moved all everything out of mt gox.

So far I love campbx, the lower exchange rate is worth the piece of mind.

It's 3:00 AM in Tokyo.
If he isn't sleeping then he must be on drugs - either way we will probably need to wait at least few more hours... :P

Strangly, that this was unnoticed by the community

Since I'm buying some coins on Monday, hopefully this will (temporarily) reduce the price ;)

Seriously though, I wonder what effect Mt Gox suddenly folding would have?

ha! yeah I hope it reduces the price too!

If mt.gox folds people will just use the next best exchange. I don't think it will have anything but a temporary effect on the economy

Does anybody remember what was the date last year?

...2011?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=87955.msg967545#msg967545

Maybe we'll see it happening the other way around this time?

2011-06-21 until 2011-06-26

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg1zig2-hourzczsg2011-06-20zeg2011-06-27ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zxzv

Are you saying you noticed it as well? It was like 10 AM UTC. I was also coming home after a night out though so I didn't bother mentioning anything just in case I was just dumb at the moment.

Check the orders between 9-10 AM UTC on 6/16. There are like 10 minute gaps.

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg10zig1-minzczsg2012-06-17zeg2012-06-17ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv

No, I did not, that is why I was asking

but this time it is definitly something different anyway

So is this how normal stock exchanges work? downtime during the weekend? That sucks.

My freakin' luck.

I literally haven't traded anything in over a year. Just this morning I was like, "What the hay" transferred a majority of my BTC (I don't have many to begin with) to Mt. Gox and leave for a nice stroll.  Come back and see this and brain goes into panic mode.

Looks like I was able to bring my BTC back home, so that's good.

Waking up Mark now.

I wish I could hear this conversation.  I imagine it'd be a fun listen.

So this Frenchy and a Noo Yawker meet in a bar talk on the phone...

The symptoms are others than one week before: Order list is seen now, orders can be cancelled, but new orders are kept in a "pending" state.

So I think, for some reason new orders cannot be placed, but existing ones are cancelled, so the gap between bid and ask grows.

Suppose it's only a technical issue. Waiting on Mt.Gox to wake up.

I wonder, currently if you look at orderbook you can see how price is changing, and on the bid side it is droping and on asks side it is rising.

Would it be from technical and financial point of view better to shut down the orderbooks too , because  in current situation when there is no actual trading orderbook cannot be qualified as representing actual market status.

I mean will this induce panic or? What am I missing?

No announcement or anything - are the trades still happening against those on the book before this happened?

As I saw no response from MT.Gox support and the site is stopped for more than 4 hours I decided to withdraw my btc's. What happened I do not know, but I would not wait whatever it is to come good or bad, I'm safe now.

Nope, no trades for almost 6 hours

Oh look...business as usual for Gox.  Here's a surprised face for you  :o  Glad I moved everything out of there last week.

I decided to peg my bitcoins to gold spot at 1573.6 with bitdaytrade.com (http://bitdaytrade.com) i think it is good Opportunity to hedge and may be profit some Bitcoin.

It's quite likely that there is nothing to worry about. We'll just have to wait a bit to find out what's going on. People seem to be paranoid about Gox these days for absolutely no reason. They've had some issues with Dwolla which have more to do with Dwolla than Gox, and suddenly people are all "it's going to fold any day". Give me a break for Satoshi's sake.

At the very least, Gox has a serious communication problem. How long did it take them to even start explaining the Dwolla situation?

Hope this has nothing to do with Dwolla, then I would worry ...

hmmm ya! most are offline more then 50% of the time
bitcoin is weird in that its traded 24/7

cant wait to hear what happened, its probably nothing more then a computer glitch...

Mark has to wake up and hit reboot...

One would think that after what happened one year ago MtGox would have someone on duty 24/7...
Though it doesn't seem like so - good to know, BTW :)

The issue leading people to worry "it's going to fold any day now" is not Dwolla, but bank wires too. We would understand if it was just Dwolla, and many would buck up and pay the ~$50 cost of a bank wire. The problem is bank wires are delayed too, for no good reason, for weeks before they ever get initiated into the banking system, and that can't be Dwolla's fault at all.

is that wires going in and out?

Unless an anniversary hack is revealed, I dont think so. Whenever MtGox was down in the past (unless there was a hack) trading just commenced naturally afterwards.

Yeah, it's currently 05:31 in Japan.

So Mark's probably sleeping.

However, I have some viewpoints:

1. Mark need to trust 1 or two others to have admin access to MtGox. What if he gets hit by a bus ? Where's the backup solution ?
2. As MtGox is the biggest exchange, they should take great care to monitor all systems 24/7, if not they lose business, and trust is eroded.
3. There's a lot of businesses depending on MtGox being available, and therefore point 2.) is extra important.

MtGox has already clearly shown that they are not good at communication with the customers and PR work overall, so they should actually get help from somebody that is good at this.

In the end, I don't think there's anything to worry about, once Mark gets back, he'll probably kick all in working order again.

HOWEVER, this is simply not good enough in the corporate world of today. When Gox decided to run their exchange 24/7, that's also what they need to do in a serious way, then 'glitches' are not acceptable. And if it occurs, it should be fixed, and the community should get an honest and candid explanation of what happend, and it should not happen again.

If I were Mark, I'd let external experts review the code base to avoid future "glitches" and also have a financial audit of MtGox to regain trust in the community.

I have no doubt that Mark believes in bitcoin and work hard to make MtGox a good exchange, but he needs to see his own limitations, and to delegate work, he can't do it all himself.

Because of all the unrest these days (delayed payments etc), personally I don't hold any funds at MtGox, be it USD or BTC at the moment.

I would love to see MtGox succeed, but they have to up their game, as other professional players WILL move into this market.

One thing that I absolutely would love to see was better follow up of withdrawals. Customers actually invest their funds, and this is money that the customers own. When withdrawals take 30 days or more, these monies are being held 'hostage' and the customers needs to be notified about the status of their withdrawal in a much better way.

There should be absolutely no need for any customers coming running to this forum to resolve a withdrawal request.

Many people are too proud to admit to weaknesses and problems. IF there's USD liquidity problems at Gox, which many customers seems to believe, then it would be better if MtGox was honest about it, and told the community about the current situation, and made a plan to get out of that situation, perhaps raising fees temporarily and doing other measures to balance the books.

If it is so that only the customers that complains the loudest are the ones getting their cases solved, so that the Gox crew can avoid the fire, while the rest who wait in patience are the ones having to endure the painful waiting of their funds, it is a very unfortunate situation and while Gox is perhaps scared of telling how the situation is, perhaps they're afraid of losing customers. Not telling how things really is, could backfire pretty hard in the end. As we all know, the road to "hell" is paved with good intentions.

It's also very dangerous not to care about the customers, because once there are viable alternatives, customers will move to other exchanges. Being biggest today, doesn't mean you'll stay biggest forever.

Swift handling of customer funds is the single most important thing.

I called Mark's cell twice and sent him a text.  No reply,  but it was around 4AM Sunday morning in Tokyo.

YEEEY!! Im the first to post:

ITS BACK UP!!


-edit- kind of

+1

EDIT:

Except for the one about letting "external experts" review the code. A financial audit may be appropriate, if the community demands one, but anyone "reviewing" any code is just asking for trouble...

If you are going to hack gox do it when it is 3 AM in Japan

I have entered a valid buy order, seem's to be up again :-)

I propose one of the following:


1. Mark appoints a co-admin that can monitor gox, so Mark can sleep well.
2. I suggest that a bucket filled with cold tap water is attached to the roof above Mark's bed, whenever the need arise, some reputable Community members can send a txt/mail to a dedicated device that will turn the bucket upside down, and thus wet-booting Mark so he can mend his Gox services.

For all we know, perhaps he's gone somewhere and will be unavailable the entire weekend, perhaps he forgot his cell at home as well..

Update, seems like we had a trade:

Still down for me :(

I've got a very huge (SWIFT) transfer in the "processing" state (for two weeks already) and I'm getting really paranoid right now. Very unpleasant feeling.

lol.

https://i.imgur.com/IZYCzl.png (https://i.imgur.com/IZYCz.jpg)

A code review could've been done on a designated machine, in a designated office, while Mark watches over the back of the Auditor, it depends how seriously you want to have the audit done. Outsourcing it to some random company surely could mean a lot of trouble.

Orders still pending for me  :(

excuse me, I was wrong, the new orders are all in pending state yet.

On a Sunday morning.  Ironic if this was a hack.

7 hours 30 minutes

http://i50.tinypic.com/207apv5.png

The relatively small 180 or so bitcoin loss I took from the (most recent) bitcoinica debacle helped me realize that I should be in total control of my bitcoins as often as possible.  I hope nothing serious is happening here, but if it is something serious, then my appreciation for my appreciation of one of bitcoin's most revolutionary properties - that people can safeguard their own wealth - will grow even more than it already has over the past several weeks.  Good luck everyone.

Why it's centralization is bad...

I think, things like this ensures that there is more space for new innovative services on the market for new players.

at least BTC withdrawal still works

but not so fast

the only trade in 7 hours is only 0.2 BTC

http://i49.tinypic.com/2lstsa0.png

This looks more like a performance problem, than a crash. So more probably a technical reason.

That's good.

Is this patented yet?

wet-booting preferable to jack-booting

ha ha, and then boot-strap-on-ing :)

still here ... still waiting ...
need red bull ... thats a long night to Monday

Where is some acknowledgement from empty-gox?

its back!!

Yes, they need to start explaining what the "techinical problem" was so that we can trust them.

and here is it real time water fall

http://i46.tinypic.com/ww1bnm.png

<MagicalTux> someone called order/add without passing a currency couple in the new api (was not possible before, but since we standardized calls it became possible)
<MagicalTux> and order/add didn't check if it had a currency couple, since it was not possible to not pass one when it was created
<MagicalTux> not possible anymore, anyway
<MagicalTux> I'll get a clean announce made explaining what happened and how it won't happen again monday
<MagicalTux> (and maybe I should get myself a really loud pager for these specific cases)
<MagicalTux> We'll get an emergency update posted, main priority is to ensure there was no bigger issue than that and resume trading

What does this mean?

from what i can tell it seems like there was some sort of an error in the system that set off a manual intervention....somehow someone set a buy order without any BTC amount attached to it.  very odd and am awaiting an official statement for gox

MagicalTux> looks like someone managed somehow to place an order to buy a couple of nothing
MagicalTux> there was a buy order without "BTC" set

Next time, launch new API's after waking up. Not before going to sleep!

There's something called software testing as well, unit tests etc. You don't launch something and 'hope it works'.

Cut him a little slack. It's not like he botched the entire Facebook IPO like Nasdaq.

Hi everyone! Sorry for the little Glitch but everything is back in order. We will also would like to thanks everyone who contacted us to warm us in order to fix it.

Here you are the Official announcement regarding the freeze.

https://support.mtgox.com/entries/21616122-resolved-outage-30254-trading-unavailalable


[OUTAGE-30254 ] Trading Unavailalable
Hello Mt.Gox Users,

At approximately 23:00JST on June 23, 2012, trading became unavailable due to an invalid trade order which was not checked correctly by the Add Order API. The trading system however, detected this and halted itself to wait for further  instructions,  resulting in this outage. 
 
Trading is now back to normal.  We apologize for the inconvenience our users have suffered because of this outage and would like to thank you for your patience through this issue. If you have any further questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact Mt.Gox Support.

Mt.Gox Team

HUGE props to MtGox on the transparency here. I am really thankful that they were willing to explain the exact nature of the problem, so that we can all see what a big deal it is not.

Sure, downtime like this should not happen, and will only help competitors. Sure, somebody should be "on call" to fix these kinds of things. However, mistakes happen, we all know that, and the important thing is how one reacts to them.

Should slack cutting be based on the fact that there are bigger fuckups than Mt Gox's downtime or on the fact that the downtime was easily preventable with the standard practice of unit tests? I think the latter.

His slack was all used up when he leaked all of our emails and passwords.

For all you know, there could have been a subtle bug in the unit tests.

There are people who spend their lives on software verification and guess what: so far, there is no silver bullet.

I've been away for several months and was expecting better. The BTC economy needs quality service from it's leading exchange.

It seems that the mtgox get some automated circuits, that's good sign.

It would be better if the automated circuits actually displayed a message on the site, like on Heroku:

"Our automated systems detected a potential problem and all trading has been halted. Our technicans have been notified and we're looking into this problem. We will provide more information as it arrives".

This way, there would be no panic and people would just patiently wait for the situation to be resolved.

a bug resulting in a halt is always possible in a system like this.

+1 for transparency.

-1 for taking too long to post a statement.

Well, I told you so. The issue smelled like a technical glitch and that it was. Mt. Gox is still not the biggest company in the world and it happened at an unfortunate time, so I think it's fair to cut them some slack. However I hope they learn from this and make sure that in the future there is someone on hand to handle it without a 4 hour delay.

Testing might be an issue as well but testing complex systems in a fool proof way is not easy. Bugs can always happen, the most important thing to learn from this is that it just can't all be up to Mark. There needs to be someone online, with access, when he's asleep.

I take no issue with this problem or the way it was handled.

I take issue with having to wait to get money out of Mt.Gox.  There is ZERO reason a $200 withdraw should take a week or more.

Is down again or is closed?   ??? http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/mtgoxUSD.html

What the fuck is happening now?

I did received a strange mail yesterday asking me to verify my info on mtgox (which I didn't do). Is it related?

I received the same a couple of days ago, but did not react since I have already shared everything with them weeks ago.

I believe this recent mail could be a SPAM / FISHING attempt.

Check the link's address and see if it's actually MTGox.

Yeah, it was not, it was a good ol' fishing attempt. I wonder if it's related

I get this kind of shit daily too so I'd say no, not really related. I even get Runescape and WoW phishing emails on my 'beater' email too. (which is not related to those games whatsoever)

The same here, but this time it is just some bottleneck on bitcoincharts.com side. Now it seems to be fixed, and old trades are populated.