We're working on various solutions for this. The problem is if the trademark is not held by a company which trade is actually bitcoin related, it'd make the trademark mostly void.

Change of ownership shouldn't be an issue, as there is no point in preventing people from using bitcoins as an exchange (except if attempting to kill our own userbase). Bankruptcy could  be more of an issue, however we are working on solving this problem too as we explore possible options with our legal counsels. As soon as we have found a definitive option, we'll announce it.

We registered the Bitcoin trademark to protect it and allow anyone to use Bitcoins without risking to be attacked by our Pascazi friends (or other people).

More people using Bitcoin freely is of course good for our business. Some US lawyer registering the trademark in various countries with plans to profit from the registration and not by allowing more people to use Bitcoin is bad for our business.

We didn't register the trademark for the purpose of preventing others from using the word Bitcoin, but to protect ourselves and our customers from people who have this kind of mindset.

We are working on improving the situation with liquidity, and have currently some issues because of the volume of illegal activity that took place in the past year.

Things are moving forward and I expect to see things back to normal by June.

You know, this transfer was credited to your account more than a week ago, and I can see you already spent & withdrew it. I don't see why you're posting about this today.

Considering you are releasing your own version of the facts, I hereby request your authorization to release all the details we have to allow everyone reading this to be able to understand our position, which you make deliberately sound "bad".

Something you seem to not understand is that this is already a law enforcement matter. Your actions may be against the laws in most countries (at least Japan and USA) and threats are not helping much.

Anyway we reach a conclusion on the current investigation (which you can help by providing documentation explaining your multiple identities) not much can be done.

Because of the volume of wires we process, checks are done randomly or when our system automatically detects something wrong. In your case the system detected something was really wrong, and forwarded the case for manual verification.
We confirmed something was wrong and forwarded this for investigation. Next time I suggest you learn a bit more about international monetary laws, it'd allow you to like Bitcoin a bit more, and understand why not following rules can put you in a situation you obviously don't like.

Getting your issue solved promptly would have been easier too if you had opened a ticket with us earlier (and not when I finally ask you to do so on the forum) and if you weren't so insulting in your messages to our staff.

Did you open a support ticket about this? If so, could you tell me your ticket number ?

v=spf1 a:mail.regall.net mx:mail.regall.net +all

+all means "everybody welcome"

We are trying to have the law enforcement agencies contacting us working with the "Bitcoin Police" (which is the most exchange-neutral entity working toward a legal bitcoin), and offload the tainted coin verification to them. It'd work a bit differently (no way for us to know which coins are tainted until they hit us) but it'd also allow other people to be part of the process easily and know they received tainted coins before spreading these.

Depending on how small the withdraw was, it can take time to be accepted on the network. Since we do not have a system allowing us to add fees at this point, it can be long. We are working on various ways to improve this, however.
I think I saw a message from our support team asking for the status of that withdraw earlier today, I'll check that tomorrow at the office.


If that's what I think it is (funds sent back to originating address, which is not recommended), there's almost nothing any online wallet can do about that (actually we could add an option similar to green address to allow you to have your funds go through a deposit address allocated to your account first, but that'd be encouraging a practice which should be avoided). Your funds were most likely credited to another MtGox user (the input used for outgoing txs is usually the output of someone else's deposit).
We allocate users dedicated deposit addresses, however if bitcoins are sent to the wrong address, not much can be done about it (proving that coins sent to a different address are yours alone can be very difficult, if not impossible).

When you use the coupon, it doesn't show in your history.

If you ordered today, you should receive an email when we ship your Yubikey, next Tuesday (we ship on Tuesday and Friday).

If you need more details you can contact the support. If you do not want to have to give your ID to anyone, you should limit yourself to Bitcoin and never touch USD/EUR/etc, as those kind of money also come with all kinds of regulations, which we are required to follow. We do not have any "rule for unverified", and while usage of our service usually do not require verification (as long as we stay within normal parameters), anything unusual may trigger a ID verification requirement.

Now, you're talking about "suspicious behavior", which can usually be clarified by contacting the support. In those case, we may need to be able to show your ID to law enforcement or (in case of EUR/USD/etc) see the funds taken back by the bank/financial partner/law enforcement, so we cannot allow deposited funds to be withdrawn, at least until we can confirm your ID.

We are also working on the delays, and should be able to provide real time transfers for verified users within a couple of months (or more, if we encounter any issue).

In the meantime transfers are processed manually by our bank, especially since our activity is seen as "high risk". We will improve this with the new withdraw system we are working on (should go live next week).

We do not lock an account because of tainted coins, however we may require an ID. We may lock an account only if we have evidence the account owner is actually behind the theft, or if law enforcement have reached that conclusion and gets a court to order us to lock the account.

The coins may be returned to the real owner only if we actually caught and locked an account. If you are not the thief and act without knowledge that the coins you have are stolen, then you are "not wrong" (the place where you got the coins from is, and we may ask you where you transferred those coins from so the law enforcement can continue their investigation).
So far we have only been able to lock coins once (in 3 cases), and only a part. We cannot decide to return the coins to the original owner, a court has to decide this for us.

I'll see so we publish whatever we can publish on this next week.

Just a note for European users, we will resume SEPA withdraws "soon" (next week, or the week after that), with a much lower fee than regular international transfers (it'll probably be the same fee we used to apply). We are working on the withdraw UI right now.

We also have limited international withdraw amount to at least $75, since a lot of fees can be taken from that. We used to send small amounts from HSBC (cheaper since they can route through their branches worldwide), but due to fraudulent payments (inbound), HSBC asked us to stop doing bitcoin-related business with them for now, so we have no choice but to send from Japan (more expensive).

"Tainted" means we have received a request for investigation from the Japanese law enforcement (either the CyberPolice, or an international investigation backed by a court). In some cases we may cooperate with other law enforcement around the world on a case by case basis. As of today there is only one active case, and in the past 12 months, we have marked some bitcoins on only 3 occasions.

Anyway, laws in most countries means that any exchange operating legally is required to act upon knowledge of stolen properties, and prevent to the best of their ability resell of such (failure to do so causes the exchange to be considered accomplice and can cause the people running it to face various charges depending on the context). That doesn't mean that just anyone can come and see us asking to get bitcoins marked. We need some proof and law enforcement to be involved.

Because a Bitcoin exchange deals with both the Bitcoin world and the current financial (legacy?) world, we have to comply with rules from both sides. This means we are fated to be hated by both bankers around the world for supporting something that aims at replacing them, and bitcoin supporters for complying with outdated regulations. Our goal is to find the right balance between both worlds and create a kind of bridge to allow for easier adoption of bitcoin (if it was totally impossible to exchange bitcoin against fiat, we'd have some issues finding Bitcoin users).

There are not many tainted coins. Except during big events such as the Linode hack, we rarely see any tainted coin hit us at all.

This configuration is to be set on the merchant side. Our Magento module (and any module we release after that) will include this setting.

Right now we only allow two values, either confirm payment at 0 confirmations (instantly when the transaction is seen) or at 6 confirmations. Note that when sending from an MtGox account, there is no need for confirmations.

Hi,

If you let me know your account ID, I'll be able to check your order. Please make sure to do not delete such orders in such a case.


Mark