I try to follow this but it is tough -- if you want to participate in the bitcoin economy anyways.

Last time I got scammed:   transferred btc to weexchange to purchase asicminer shares. Zoinks, owner of exchange, Jon Montrol, accepted deposits for over a month while not allowing any withdrawals. Basically just stole everyone's money, but I didn't hear about it until it was too late. Got away with millions with no repercussions. Now I am too paranoid to put my btc anywhere for any time.

It is well and good to keep your btc on your home wallet but sure doesn't help the bitcoin economy at all.

We need decentralized exchanges.

Pretty similar to what happened with weexchange.

Why be a douchebag?

You should chose, instead, not to be a douchebag.

I don't know about a rally, but a party could be in order for the downfall of Gox. I really, really, really hope it is the last time they cause a crash. I'll be stoked if they never recover and close up shop.

It's not a 'waste'.

The work of PoW is work to create a currency that can not be counterfeit,  fungible,fast, and can not be created out of thin air like fiat.

And there are alternatives. Both in the PoS coins , like Hobonickels which make me 6% interest, and many others. Such as coins that ontribue computing resources to projects, like CureCoin.

If you want to talk about waste, how about the money and energy involved in building America's latest supercarrier. Or the Olympics.  Bitcoin has a lot of value and is useful.

Well this is time of great rejoicing for me. Gox  -- the largest contributor to the largest number of crashes in bitcoin -- is just about completely finished.

This is great!

I would strongly recommend against this. You probably have better odds playing blackjack at a casino at this point.

Unfortunately your money has been stolen by the owner of the exchange Jon Montrol.  

He accepted bitcoin deposits for a while knowing he wasn't able to pay back. He also took out some big loans and defaulted and hasn't been heard from in a few weeks.  It appears likely (to me anyways) he was using users' deposits to his exchange as his own personal wallet and took off with funds.

About half of the users whose funds were stolen are in denial he's going to show up one day 'in the future' and give them all their deposits back.

Their are about 5-8 threads on this topic.

I don't know about anyone else but I'm gonna celebrate when Gox false off of the Internet.

They caused enough trouble, be great for another more competent exchange with better software take over, such as Kraken.

Keep up the good work Tranz.

And for hobonickel traders:  please , if you can, take you business to Atomic Trade or CoinEx.   Why? Cryptsy sucks.  Their software bugged and now I have a negative BTC balance and unable to get my hobo's out -- be warned, could happen to you.

Atomic Trade has very little volume (next to none for HBN) but as far as I can tell is much more reliable and better than Cryptsy.

I'm really, really surprised that it took them this long enough to figure out why AMD video cards were sold completely out of stock all over the place all the time while NVIDIA cards stayed on the shelves.

Welcome to the party NVIDIA!

I'm sorry but does it matter much?

Anyone who has a brain can see that Ukyo stole/lost over a million dollars of users' deposits.  He isn't even really bothering to keep up the façade anymore.

Does tracking how he spent his stolen bitcoins matter? It has been months, he doesn't even post updates anymore, he's under no pressure to returns the stolen deposits, and no one is doing anything about it. You might as well just move on I guess because Ukyo stole a LOT of money, including mine and your own, and got away with it.

I think Gox will survive and be just fine.

Why? Because people didn't stay away after they were large part of all the other big price crashes in bitcoin.

I really hope I'm wrong though. I wish they would just disappear. The management is a bunch of imbeciles and they have been shown to untrustworthy.

If I wanted a fractional reserve system I'll just stick to fiat thanks.

It bothers me that the community doesn't stop using Gox. They have been major participators, or arguably even the instigators, of more than half of the major price crashes for bitcoin yet people still go back.

I'd imagine the 'last straw' would be the idiotic blame game Kappels (or whatever is name is) put on bitcoin to cover Mt Gox's incompetence, or, the huge evidence of insider trading that recently surfaced, but if I had to bet, knowing how things didn't change in the prior crashes they caused, people will go back to them anyways, and it kind of sucks.

I'm sorry to hear your story.

There are a lot of good people in the bitcoin community but there is also a large amount of scammers and thieves. I've been scammed a few times myself, the latest by WeExchange, who's owner Jon Montroll treated users' deposits as his own personal wallet who then absconded.  

Gox is one of the worst out there, they have been directly responsible for more than one major bitcoin price crash and continue to be used, which is surprising to me.

Maybe, I don't know, maybe you can use your experience to warn people about Gox and some good will come out of it -- like you are doing now; or try to get a lawsuit together. Just please don't let this incident spoil you on the entire concept of bitcoin. The software is great, its just many of the folks that use it are bad people. I hope your luck changes and there is some way you can get your money back.

Paypal is a terrible company. Though only became such a giant because they had such a monopoly hold on the market.

I'm really hoping bitcoin services will replace Paypal, not be integrated by it.

Thought game here: what possible scenario could we have for Ukyo :

a) taking deposits from users knowing he was not able to pay them back for over a month and half.

b) what technical problem could he possibly be working on for 2.5 months that was render all of funds unavailable.  And what technical problem could be 'solved' leading to the recovery of our deposits. Really.

c) taking out a big loan when this started for unstated reasons that he defaulted on.

d) what possible 'legal reasons' could he have for not being able to explain the situation. I can not think of a single situation either. (What, do you think he has a secret gag order from the CIA or something? )

e) he hasn't posted on these forums for 2 weeks.

f) I admit this is just a suspicion here: but it is very auspicious timing that this went down right went bitcoin entered it's last boom.

I'm open to any hypothesis that explains the situation.

My personal conclusion is you are being strung along.

Look guys I'm going to owe Ukyo 10,000 apologies if he actually pays us all back.  Trust me, I'll feel really, really, really bad if this is so. I'm very much not an asshole in real life, I just get angry when my money is stolen.

But by using logic, and looking at the the situation rationally, the most likely situation by a very large margin is that he did something illegal and has absconded with the funds.

If you don't buy my conclusion, or are still in denial, describe exactly the situation to a friend who has never heard of Ukyo before, and listen to what they say.

Or think of this: if you deposited $10,000 in a bank, or at car lot, or to a realtor, and they said they had 'technical problems' and could not describe them 'for legal reasons' and then they told you "updates coming next week" for a few months and then stopped communicating with you altogether -- and another 1,000 people, what would you do ? Would you really say 'oh maybe he'll come pay me my life savings, I trust this guy, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt -- even though I don't even know him -- for three or six or however long it takes. Pretty please an update Ukyo, thanks man, good luck sorting out the problems! '.  Really..?  Like.... really?  

..really?  Sometimes I get suspicious that some of you have been paid off and its all of us small account holders have been left with the empty bag, because I just can't fathom doing nothing if I had $5000, $10,000 or $100,000 on the line. If lived anywhere remotely near Texas I'd be down there tomorrow, and I've only lost 1 btc.

I wish people would stop using Gox. They have contributed more to price crashes than any other single thing in the entire world of bitcoin.

Just let Gox die already everyone.  It's caused what, 3 major crashes now? THe company is run by a bunch of dolts.

I love how they get people on to talk about bitcoin.... who don't know much about bitcoin.  It's like this isn't even journalism 101 guys, it's common sense.

Personally I'm also a really big fan of taking all the dumb talking points of the anti-bitcoin idiots and applying directly what they say to fiat USD. Most of the time, using the same comparison and the same arguments, bitcoin just looks all the stronger.