If people are shocked by the quality of code seen from MtGox, you should stop using your bank, abandon your car and ditch your mobile phone.  There are mountains of legacy spaghetti code out there that are completely written against proper academic rules.  You use the code every day for critical applications.

Me thinks someone is trying to talk up their Bitcoin Builder investment.

The funny thing is if you present the case that a bitcoin buyer will 'only' see a 300% return on their investment within the next few years to a professional main stream investor, you would only be reinforcing the image that bitcoin is one massive pump and dump scheme.  Just because we've seen returns in the thousands of percent doesn't mean it's normal or will be repeated in the future.

Many people (myself included) moved bitcoins out of MtGox when they became uneasy with the service.  For me personally it was the requirement in mid 2013 to send in passports and other ID just to get cash withdrawals.  Umm, no thanks.  Zip, all bitcoins pulled out never to return.

The unfortunate thing is if everyone tried to pull their money and bitcoins out of MtGox the crash would have happened anyway, just sooner.  May 2013, late 2013, or February 2014, it was inevitable that many people would be caught up and have their savings confiscated. 

The people defending MtGox are the ones with money in it.  Usually lots of money.  I remember when MtGox stopped trades a week ago and then the site disappeared we still had posts that maybe MtGox were upgrading their system or updating the site so they had to pull it down.  Now we have people hanging into every phrase, every word that the CEO utters and interpreting it the best way possible.  "Bitcoins 'temporarily unavailable', so you're saying there's a chance!......"  Yeah, and I'm a temporarily embarrassed millionaire.

Locking your bitcoins away and not using them is the best way to ride out the highs and lows of the market if you expect the value to keep rising into the future.

But consider this: if too many people take the 'lock up and hold' approach to bitcoin it effectively reduces the usefulness of the commodity for commerce.  There is some tipping point where businesses would say 'not enough bitcoins out there, let's use something else'.  It's difficult to envisage a future where there is such high demand for bitcoins that traders are willing to pay huge fortunes for one. 

Its been 3 March for the last 12 hours here.  $554.

The people on this forum were mostly aware, and still managed to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes more.  MtGox touted itself as a super way to add bitcoin functionality to your business.  I doubt "everyone" in the business community who used MtGox's service was aware, and accepted, the risk they could one day disappear and take all the funds down with it.  How is that a superior form of doing business than with traditional banks?


Which brings us to the next point.  Which government's domain does BTC-e exist in?  There are suggestions of Cyprus, Bulgaria, and even Russia.  Big differences between the three.  Who is the auditor for BTC-e?  We could start with a simple question: who is the owner?

After the MtGox debacle there have been many suggestions that people who keep bitcoins or cash with third parties almost deserve to lose their fortune.  How messed up is that?  Bitcoin is meant to be easier to use and with more freedom than traditional money.  If we require businesses to transfer bitcoins to computers without regular internet connections or paper wallets, how is that achieving the goal of facilitating more people to use bitcoin? 

To get around the often wild fluctuations in bitcoin's value, people have suggested instantly converting bitcoins to cash and back again via exchanges so that the business doesn't carry the commodity value risk.  That's hardly doable when the parallel suggestion is to not keep any bitcoins or money in exchanges in places like Bulgaria to avoid the counter party risk.

MtGox has done more damage to bitcoin than many people yet realise.

There are some interesting issues at play here.  PirateAt40's ponzi court case has not finished afaik, but a court in the USA ruled that bitcoins do have value (defendant was claiming they were worthless internet LOL coins).  If a Japanese court sees things the same way it could cause trouble for MtGox's management.  

A separate issue is trading while insolvent: regardless of whether MtGox was trading bitcoins, stamps, or cat turds, MtGox was still trading and taking new deposits when it was pretty clear that management knew the company was insolvent.  This is a crime pretty much everywhere.  The challenge for prosecutors will be showing the company was insolvent and tracking all the bitcoins and money.  The law is against the CEO but he has complexity and novelty on his side: bitcoin may be complex and difficult enough to grasp for some aging judge that the whole thing slips through.

Either way, the CEO is going to fry.  Either 750k+ bitcoins were stolen on his watch over a period of years (his words), which means negligence of criminal magnitude, or he has to show where the bitcoins went if they weren't stolen.  He's screwed.

It's just corporate speak, wrapped in weasel words and vetted by lawyers.  The bitcoins are gone.

Quite clearly he's only stating how many bitcoins he has lost himself.  That's what the question is asking.  It does not refer to MtGox at all.  Mark is doing the right thing by being very vague with his answers.  What exactly does 'temporarily unavailable' mean?  It can mean that I don't have the bitcoins right now, but in 5 minutes I will have them.  See?  I didn't lie.

The first and only lesson:  never keep bitcoins or money at a place you don't control.  The wallet and bankroll of any exchange is a massive honeypot for all the worst the Internet has to offer.  It could all be gone tomorrow without any warning.  Unfortunately that also severely limits the opportunity to trade money for bitcoins and back again.  This is the greatest weakness bitcoin has today.

I think the OP is just having a bit of fun with us.  No one in their right mind would ever bail out a bitcoin exchange.  No one.

Accurate analysis.  It's very much content free and blaming pretty much everyone else for what has happened over the past few months.  Didn't anyone at MtGox bother to check why so many transactions were bouncing?

I have an account.  I would never use it again.  MtGox has tried the little carrot trick before by offering 0% fee trades for a few weeks.  What are they going to do now?  They would have to shower users with free bitcoins to get them to return, and even then anyone with any sense would say 'thanks' while withdrawing them.

It's one thing to halt trading until matters are sorted out.  People can still log in, get information, check balances, etc.  It's something completely different to just pull the plug without warning.  If it was the intention of MtGox to shutdown for a while before restarting they have done every single aspect of the process completely and utterly wrong.

There is no way a buyer will surface.  Assuming a buyer could be found and bitcoins returned to the site, everyone with an ounce of intelligence would immediately withdraw all their bitcoins as quickly as possible.  The way MtGox has been performing over the past few months and the abrupt shutdown pretty much precludes an orderly buyout and restart.

Turning point?  Maybe he means going down the s-bend.

I don't buy it.  If he really cared about the MtGox brand he wouldn't have pulled the plug on the exchange like he did.

This is a fine example of the OP trying to get others buying bitcoins because he is heavily invested in them.  We don't need that, especially at this time with added media scrutiny.