Decent APIs, only well functioning multi-currency exchange, very good arbitrage vs other exchanges and a deep order book.  To sum it up: Profit.

I don't need to ask.  Their address is on the bottom on this page, and I know they accept registered letters (use FedEx instead, it is usually faster and cheaper): https://support.mtgox.com/entries/21651045-AML-Account-Statuses

A lot of SEPA withdrawals on Dec 31 and Jan 1 makes sense.  Some wants to withdraw money just before the end of the year to hide the money "in flight" when the year changes (for tax reasons, e.g. capital tax) and other people want to keep their money there until 2014 for other tax reasons (e.g. avoiding capital gains tax in some cases).  In Europe the fiscal year typically follows the calendar year, with a few exceptions.

This is by no means a complete fix.  It is a patch for one of the issues, and it may still fail in case of a one block reorg.  This happens quite frequently when two miners mine a block at the same height at the same time.

In exactly the same way as when the price was 0.1 USD, 1 USD, 10 USD, 100 USD or 1000 USD.  The functionality of the bitcoin network does not depend on the price people choose to sell their bitcoins for.

6 weeks?  Where?  I am waiting for one from January 4th myself, which is 4-5 weeks ago.  Hope to have it this week, but not sure.

Fax!?  The year is 2014 now, not 1994.

MtGox has e-mail and snailmail addresses published on their website.  I don't think Bitstamp or BTC-E have published a fax number either.  You are going to sue them as well, right?  None of them have suspended trading after halting bitcoin withdrawals.


They will probably claim this is an unforeseen network issue.  I don't see any mention in their ToS allowing them to shut down trading when bitcoin or bank transfers are impossible.  Perhaps you can guide me to it?

Bitstamp is standing on the shoulders of giants, to misquote Newton.  They know (now) they have to be careful to not fall into the same trap as another well known exchange. 

Again: Bitstamp got a solid warning ahead of their problems.  I am a little surprised by the fact that they didn't disable withdrawals at once, but let it go on for hours and hours before doing something about it.  The situation at MtGox was very different.  In the beginning only a few withdrawals were affected, and most of the stuck transactions got successfully double spent and reissued after a while.  And noone knew what was happening.  Not even the core developers noticed what was going on, until phantomcircuit managed to get a tweaked raw transaction through and warned MtGox about it.

I got an answer from Bitstamp support after a little more than 24 hours, btw.  They quoted the news release.  That's it.  Nothing specific about my BTC.

Where?  I can only find a timestamp and an amount.  I can't find any transactions based on that alone.

You could e.g. specify if you asked about BTC or fiat withdrawals.

Possibly.  Did you notice the $50 price increase on MtGox which was ignited minutes after I posted my two selected quotes above?  The rally started on MtGox, and the reaction on other exchanges were limited.  Could be a coincidence of course.  In this case my quotes were easy to verify (but if this caused the price increase, the reaction was so fast I doubt the first buyers did).  A private conversation is impossible to verify, of course, and the official sources would be silent.  (As usual.)

No.

MtGox always gave me a txid which I could track, and after 2 hours I got to see all the details of the stuck transaction.

Yes, absolutely.  A trackable txid beats "Finished".

Not long, because I didn't withdraw any until people started selling BTC on MtGox at a discount.  Other people with some exceptions, waited up to a week.

Not sure.  Please quote or add more context.

Probably because you are reading the MtGox withdrawal delays [Gathering] thread, not one of the Bitstamp threads.  There are a lot of complaints on IRC and Reddit as well.

I don't like making guesses, so I'll let you all interpret this for yourselves:


Other news which may influence how you plan your BTC purchases when the BTC withdrawal floodgates open:
I.e: The amount of fiat on MtGox is increasing rapidly.

Think about this for a moment: If I made up a fake quote here where MagicalTux allegedly told me in private that MtGox would resume BTC withdrawals tomorrow morning, I could make a million by buying buckets of BTC on MtGox just before I posted it, and selling as soon as people start denouncing it as a fake.  Just by abusing your trust in me.  It will probably only work once, but that is all I need.  I can retire afterwards.  Always beware of market manipulation.  And note that my quotes above, which are correct, may be carefully selected and placed in a different context to manipulate the market.  Always be very critical to news and reports when you don't have the full story first hand, and take speculation for what it is: 100% made up, often for the purpose of manipulating the market.

What is your problem?  I am not affiliated with MtGox in any way, except as a normal user.  If you are going to reply to all posts from MtGox customers telling them they are shills, I think you should go outside and play instead.  On the highway or something.

This is only a workaround for a part of the problem, it doesn't fix it.  Even with this option on the client will spend one-confirmation outputs, which will break again in case of a reorg of one block.  A fix would e.g. use another unique ID, independent of the txid, for internal accounting, notice when a txid has changed for a transaction, and resend transactions which depend on the changed txid.

No, it doesn't.  It is just some tape to hold it better together and make it happen less frequently.

Nope.  Wouldn't make much difference.  Their problem is treating the txid as if the confirmed txid for a transaction will be identical to the txid of the transaction they sent.  And this, incidentally, is the cause of Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind failure as well.  A broken transaction (in that the signature won't get accepted by clients version 0.8 and above) just make the exploit easier because the attacker has more time.

The problem is the same (change of txid confuses clients), the consequences differs between implementations.

"Somebody (or several somebodies) is taking advantage of the transaction malleability issue and relaying mutated versions of transactions. This is exposing bugs in both the reference implementation and some exchange’s software."

"Users of the reference implementation who are bitten by this bug may see their bitcoins “tied up” in unconfirmed transactions; we need to update the software to fix that bug, so when they upgrade those coins are returned to the wallet and are available to spend again."

"As a result, exchanges are temporarily suspending withdrawals to protect customer funds and prevent funds from being misdirected."

More gold at https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=422

I expect this joke under the alias "aantonop" to demand Gavin's resignation from the Bitcoin Foundation as well.  Because the only competent non-clown in Bitcoin is obviously aantonop!  ROFL!

24 hours.  No BTC received, no BTC added back to balance and no word from support.

My 8 BTC withdrawal from this morning is still listed as "Finished" and nothing has been added back.

I don't have any selective withdraw privileges.  Mine are the same as those of any other verified user.

Using what I have learned by experience and by filtering useful information from public fora over many years to have a greater chance to succeed when I try to withdraw is not the same as selective withdraw privileges.  Not all my attempts were successful, btw.  I made a number of 10 BTC withdrawals.  Some were successful, some not.  I did it at a time when I had reason to expect a higher success rate, based on public information and my own experience. 

In this case people came to #mtgox and complained about an error message which usually means the bitcoin address entered in the withdrawal form is invalid or indicates an empty hot wallet at MtGox.  This was at the middle of the night Tokyo time, and I knew they would fill up first thing in the morning.  After a couple hours the reports stopped coming, and this would be the sweet spot.  Hot wallet refreshed with old unspent inputs which most likely would be chosen first.  They don't keep dust in their cold wallets, so I could choose a reasonable withdrawal size as well.

No special privileges or access to restricted information needed.  Everything is out in the open for everyone to learn.  I am certainly not the only one unaffiliated with MtGox who used this trick.  The fresh inputs went very quickly.  My only fault here is telling you about it.

At least MtGox credited my failed withdrawals back to my account.  The 8 BTC withdrawal I made from Bitstamp this morning is still listed as "Finished", but nothing arrived, nothing credited back and support are quiet.  AFAIK Bitstamp has no IRC support either.

And neither did MtGox.  Well, MtGox probably more than others.  People who implement financial software in general.

Gavin understands the issue as well now:
But complaining at MtGox will make it get fixed faster.  Of course.

As long as MtGox was the only one affected by this, people spent their time complaining about MtGox.  Now when they finally see what he issue is, they finally start eating their words and fixing their s**t.  And I hear a lot less complaining about MtGox now that all major exchanges have halted BTC withdrawals.  Even those who previously claimed they were immune (e.g. BTC-E).

He's just disgruntled because I never answer him, because.. hrm..  I have him on ignore.   Seriously, I have never seen donk4u add anything of value to the discussion here, so he went pretty fast.  Could try to answer him once, and perhaps he will feel appreciated as well. 

Is there any functioning exchange right now?  One where you can withdraw BTC?  I would be careful with other cryptocurrencies as well, since all are vulnerable to the same problem.

Do you want some salt on "users of the reference implementation do not need to be concerned", Gavin?