I doubt you truly do.

He offers a service that is useful to me, at a price I find reasonable. I trust him based on his reputation, which is earned, unlike a state granted license.

You don't understand. I consider the state to be illegitimate. Anyone who rejects the state gains legitimacy in my eyes. Not yours, but mine.

The money was stolen while placed in his care. His business's reputation is at stake. Let's say you had 9000 BTC in your mtgox account and it was stolen. Would you continue to do business with him if he just said "too bad" and let the thief get away with the money?

I find this outcome highly unlikely. Again, his reputation is on the line. Why would he risk it?

If you think the state endorsed banking system will let you keep money under suspicion of theft, you are sorely mistaken. Your accounts will be frozen and unless you can answer all questions to the satisfaction of the police, you will never see your money again. In fact, suspicion of illegal activity isn't even necessary in order for your money to be stolen by the police. There have been many cases in the U.S. where an individual traveling with a large amount of cash, absent any indicators of illegal activity, had their money seized by the government.

A state is an entity with a monopoly on the use of force in a geographical area. It uses violence, or the threat thereof, in order to extract money from those living within its borders, in order to provide services that may be unwanted.

Mtgox can only take my money if I agree to exchange his services for my money.

As you can see, mtgox is nothing like a state.

Just so you know, many of us here are anarchists, and care not one whit whether or not any state considers mtgox to be a "legitimate" business. So while that may be a concern for you, don't assume that it is a concern for anybody else.

edit... In fact, my trust in mtgox would be lower if he became "legitimate", almost entirely because I do not trust any states to act in a way that is good for me and my money.

I've done business with mtgox three times now - twice using paxum, once via write transfer. I have been completely satisfied each time.

I trust him, but at the same time some clear terms would be nice.

Delete everything from %AppData%\Bitcoin except wallet.dat. Make a backup of everything first if you are worried. Then, run Bitcoin. If that doesn't fix the problem, reinstall.

Are we making fun of homeopathy? I'm selling some water molecules that passed through the bladder of Oliver Cromwell.

YoYou should probably provide some evidence for this allegation.

There is no indication that this practice is happening, or will happen. Anyone could, on an individual basis, refuse to accept "tainted" Bitcoin, but I doubt their reputation would remain in good standing for long.

Don't listen to this guy. Either he was being sarcastic or he doesn't know what he's talking about. I doubt we'll see difficulty increase much faster than the 30% increments we've been seeing.

Supposedly, you deposited $45,000 USD to mtgox. Do you deposit that much money just anywhere, or only at "serious institutions"? Why did you trust mtgox with your money, but you won't trust him with a scan of your passport? If you want to show that you are serious about this, send it to him.

However, there's a higher probability (unless you exclusively trade with highly rated individuals) that you get scammed on an individual trade.

Ok. Great. No need to continue posting then, right?


It makes absolutely no sense that mtgox, a member of this community in good standing, would risk his good reputation and his business on the theft of some money.

Ah. The only contact information I'm comfortable sharing is the email address admin@mtgox.com. You said you have tried to contact him? How? I ask because when he last posted in this thread he said he was trying to contact you. I suggest you send an email to that email address with all of your contact information.

edit... For anyone curious about mtgox's rather infrequent contributions to this thread...

I have sent mtgox a bank wire in the past. Why do you need this information?

The difficulty changes are not unpredictable. You can look at the estimate here or calculate it yourself. Every 2016 blocks, the network (all of the clients) recalculate the difficulty such that over the past 2016 blocks, using the new difficulty would result in around 10 blocks being found per minute.

(this is, I am sure, a vast simplification, but it should serve to get you close enough(TM))

Dang, no wonder. Good luck with that, slush. Are you just writing your own GetWork, or are you creating your own transactions for payout as well? What would be kind of cool is if you created the generation transaction with multiple outputs, if that's possible. That way everybody gets newly minted coins.

It wouldn't be expected confirmation speed, it would be expected block insertion speed.

Confirmations always happen every ~10 minutes, since they are blocks created after the transaction is inserted into a block.

I just bought Tom Wood's Rollback. I read the first couple of chapters so far and it is quite excellent.

I was sold after watching this video.

I thought I saw discussion that something like this was going to be in place soon. Any word, SilkRoad?

If MtGox is not able to contact Baron, why would your trust in MtGox be affected?