No, you have to treat it as a get-rich-quick gold rush. The difficulty keeps increasing. Collectively, the total revenues of all miners have a hard limit.  That total revenue per month declines each month. Any edge you have in hardware only produces profits for a short period. There is no long-term business in Bitcoin mining. Bitcoin is designed that way.

Three months late is better than nothing. But it's not acceptable.

Mt. Gox should be consistently settling on T+2, like FOREX brokers. That's trade date plus 2 business days. Not weeks.

One of the reasons the real-world financial system insists on fast settlement is that if a party goes broke, you only lose a few days of transactions. Not months.

Which tower? What suite?  I called the building office, remember.

2415 Mission St, San Francisco, California.
The mail drop place is 2417 Mission. 2415 is probably above "Wholesale Fashion Shoes".

This is Jared's "hacker hotel":

20mission "Hacker Hotel" above the T-Mobile store.
Same building, different entrance. Mission St. on the right, 20th St. on the left.

20mission lists Tradehill as a tenant.  That may be where they really are.

Could be worse. PayPal started above Palo Alto Bicycles on University Avenue in Palo Alto.

The article says "Mt. Gox representative Thomas Glucksmann-Smith wrote in an email response to inquiries from MoneyBeat...". All Vigna really has is an email response from Mt. Gox "customer support." I'm disappointed.

From their perspective, Mt. Gox doesn't have a liquidity problem.  Their customers may have a problem, but Mt. Gox doesn't, since they don't have a hard obligation to pay up on a specific number of days after the trade.  If they had to settle by T+2, like everybody else in foreign exchange, they'd be dead by now. 

In the real world, when you sell a stock, you must be paid by T+3, that is, the third business day after the trade. Money market funds usually settle on T+1.  Foreign exchange transactions settle by T+2. These are hard limits - a brokerage that fails to meet the settlement date is in default, in big trouble, and may be out of business within days.  That happened to Lehman.  Hero to zero in three days.  (Here's the dramatized version of the Lehman collapse, courtesy of the BBC.)

Note that Mt. Gox did not say that they have 100% of customer funds. Their terms of service say they must keep 100% of customer funds in a segregated account. Whether they actually have all the money is an open question.

And they don't have some combination of lawyers, debt collectors, Japan FSA investigators, and goons banging on Mt. Gox's door in Shibuya?

That's because it's illegal in Europe: "In addition to other information requirements established by Community law, Member States shall ensure that the service provider shall render easily, directly and permanently accessible to the recipients of the service and competent authorities, at least the following information:

(a) the name of the service provider;
(b) the geographic address at which the service provider is established"

That's from the European Directive on Electronic Commerce, the purpose of which was to encourage citizens of the EU to deal with companies in the EU but in other countries. The EU does this to discourage "take the money and run" operations.

Could you post a screenshot of that, please?  Thanks.

I just called the building management office of One Market, a building I have been in many times.  Autodesk has their museum/meeting center/training center there.

Conversation with the building office:

Q: Do you have a tenant called Tradehill, Inc?
A: No. They might be a subtenant of some other tenant, though.
Q: What would happen if someone mailed a letter to Tradehill Inc, One Market?
A: It would probably just sit there.

Any questions?

            John Nagle

That's already happened. The spread between Mt. Gox and other exchanges is now around 10%.  The price of Bitcoins is not going up; the value of a dollar stuck in Mt. Gox is going down.

Reality check: anybody who could get returns like that wouldn't be peddling it on some Bitcoin forum.

Mt. Gox's problems do increase the USD/Bitcoin price on Mt. Gox, because a dollar you can't get out of Mt. Gox is worth less than a dollar you can.

Whether Mt. Gox is 1) broke, 2) manipulating the market, 3) stealing customer funds, or 4) merely incompetent is not clear. Read the threads over in "Service discussion". The Mt. Gox situation is very bad and getting worse. 

(All posts from that user appear to be ads for Bitcoin-Brokers.)

(All posts from that user appear to be ads for Bitcoin-Brokers.)

So Mt. Gox withdrawals in USD, Euros, and CAD are now stalled. Are Bitcoin withdrawals still reliable, or is that starting to break down too?

Prices on Mt. Gox are getting more unrealistic as more people run into withdrawal problems. There's now a 12% spread between BTC-E and Mt. Gox in Bitcoin/USD.

The other exchanges are iffy, though. BTC-E is in Russia, and Bitstamp's address in the UK is a mail drop.  Nobody is really strong enough to make a market.

The Monsanto House of the Future
100% synthetic materials.  Built by Monsanto at Disneyland in 1957, it was open for tours for a decade.  It held up fine, but was demolished in the late 1960s (the wrecking ball bounced off and they had to use saws) to make room for another attraction.


Rubbermaid's largest plastic shed.

Rubbermaid has a whole line of plastic sheds. They keep coming out with larger models. They could easily make a house if there was a market.

Fire resistance is a problem. 

The reason Bitcoin prices on Mt. Gox are higher than the other exchanges is because nobody can get their money out of Mt. Gox. The arbitrageurs are stuck.  Normally, when there's a significant difference between prices on two exchanges, somebody buys on one and sells on the other, making an immediate profit. Soon, the spread narrows and such activity stops. There are 'bots doing this automatically. It's the same money going round and round; arbitrageurs don't have to keep injecting money into the system to do this.

With Mt. Gox refusing to allow withdrawals (or broke), that activity stops, due to lack of available cash for buying Bitcoins on non Mt. Gox exchanges. The necessary cash is stuck (or lost) in Mt. Gox cash accounts.

Putting in more money to buy Bitcoins on Bitstamp to sell on Mt. Gox would be a big mistake. You end up with a cash balance on Mt. Gox you can't withdraw and may lose if (when) they go down.

I'm realistic.