Well, I hope you are right, I had a large deposit which hit today Bitstamp and I placed all my bids between $520 and $400.

Doesn't look too good ATM to be honest, but patience is a virtue.


Well, a little bit of that is mine. I guess that many bitcoiners followed the same line of thought I did: they got all excited by Gox going down, they smelled blood on the streets and they rushed to send as much fiat as possible to the exchanges to buy as many cheap coins as possible... And they failed. At least for now

Exactly the same for me.

To those screaming because of this: ANY company managing funds on behalf of third-parties is required to comply with both AML and KYC requirements.

1) AML is pretty straight forward. You need to ask a) ID and b) proof of residence of your customers. That's what all exchanges do to verify their customers and it is standard procedure.

2) KYC is trickier. There's no "official" procedure, but any company managing funds on behalf of third parties is required to "know their customers" - as broad as that definition might seem. If shit hits the fan and LE investigates one of the company's customers, the company needs to have as much info as possible on that customer to avoid to face any legal problems.

Summing up: to comply with current AML regulations an ID and proof of residence should be enough, but any company willing to avoid problems *must* do their own due diligence when they spot something suspicious. Probably none of our transfers/withdrawals were suspicious, but in my personal case I was asking a big fiat withdrawal. With *big* I mean an order of magnitude bigger than what I guess is the average withdrawal requested by a small-time trader. I'm not surprised Bitstamp is asking that kind of questions, and in my opinion they are as general and vague as they could be. In my case I also replied with vague answers ("I bought those Bitcoins a few years ago"; "I don't know when I will use your service again or how many bitcoins I will buy or sell in the future, it depends on the market", etc.). Bitstamp gave me the OK to those questions in 24 hours and processed that withdrawal the day after. It looks like they are doing what they should be doing: asking for as much info as possible to their "bigger volume" customers.

IMO there's absolutely nothing to be worried about and in fact it is good news that Bitstamp is gathering KYC info on their customers.

Proof of those coins being bought at 90% value? When I asked I was told that the offer was no longer valid. IMO that was the last "marketing stunt" performed by Sturles, who probably is a Gox contractor. That would explain the passionate defense of every unbelievable/absurd excuse made up by Gox, the denial of every clear read flag and insolvency signal, and last but not least his silence lately, as Karpeles has written on his website:

I'm sorry to be an ass, but you should come back to reality. The outstanding balances on MtGox are gone. For good. The best you can expect is to see Karpeles going to jail for a brief paid vacation - but that's not so likely.

We had a very long and fair warning for everybody. Gox has been sending very strong insolvency signals since April 2013, and during the summer those signals piled up in such a way that anybody defending Gox during the last quarter of 2013/beginning of 2014 was either an ignorant fool, a troll or a paid shill.

They always looked like fundamentally honest people, but incompetent to the point of gross (if not criminal) negligence.
They were willingly running fractional reserve (which you CANNOT unless you are a bank - and an exchange is NOT a bank) while they were desperately trying to increase their revenues to cover the holes - in the meantime their customers were treated like fools and fed with absurd explanations that nobody with half a brain or a minimum experience in running a business could believe.

I'd suggest not prolonging the denial phase any further.

The leaked doc is crazy. It would be astonishing if they really had a hole of $22M in customers fiat funds, where did all that money go?

"A cold wallet technique that can't be broken, because of the cryptographic implications"

That's obviously a fake - and one written by someone with very little knowledge of what he is writing about.

Axiom #0 is an absolute truth, but it is somewhat abused by services like blockchain.info in order to provide a false sense of security to its customers.

Despite of what the operators of blockchain.info and similar services like to say, having the exclusive possession of your private keys is *not* the only security measure you should follow to take counterparty risk out from the equation. A third-party service like blockchain.info can still steal users coins in a trivial way just by injecting code, as it happened when strongcoin "intercepted" 1k coins to return them to OzCoin after a hack. More info also in this post and this one.

I'm usually a fan of Andreas, but this rant disappointed me. Half of it is pure marketing of his own product, and it's a lie: despite of the private keys being held client-side, for blockchain.info would be trivial to steal users funds. They just need to inject code to "redirect" funds to a different address on the next transaction, as strongcoin did to return to OzCoin the coins that were stolen to the pool.

Third party wallets are always insecure by definition.

The thing is that selling a company such as Gox is a process that takes months. You need a due diligence and the numbers have to be crystal clear.

Either Gox was already in advanced negotiations and the buyer already finalized its due diligence, etc. and now its getting a last-minute discount because or the current shitstorm, either all this is just BS and stall tactics.

Rudrigo, you misunderstood me. I will give you the context. Stolfi made a post saying the following:

a) Bitcoinrain owner is a known thief, who apart from running a ponzi claimed to have 10k btc stolen which he just stole himself
b) Bitcoinrain owner runs Mercado Bitcoin, and people is still using Mercado Bitcoin despite of it being owned by a known thief
c) From a) and b) he implied that people into bitcoin is especially stupid/greedy

What I pointed out is that:

1) Mercado Bitcoin is currently owned by a different person
2) We do not know for sure if the 10k BTC theft was an "inside job" or an "outside job", so making that kind of bold assumptions and presenting them as facts is kinda pointless. I added that AFAIK the 10k theft happened indeed, meaning that it was mostly fueled by incompetence and not by insider collusion. Note that I used "AFAIK" every time i wrote about this matter and I never implied certainty.

Summing up:, I just wanted to highlight how Mr.Stolfi here is making wild assumptions (a), mixing them with a lack of knowledge of the facts (b), and using those to push a trolling/fud-spreading agenda.

I don't know Bitcoinrain's owner personally - I happen to know the current owner of Mercado Bitcoin, and they are two separate persons. The Bitcoinrain owner SOLD Mercado Bitcoin to a third party, who is completely unrelated to the ponzi/fund. And BTW: despite of the questionable business model of the aforementioned fund, AFAIK the theft of aprox. 10k bitcoins owned by Bitcoinrain indeed happened and it was not an "inside job" as you implied.

I explained the above just to point out how you are just mis-reading shit on forums and then making up assumptions to support your old-and-already-debunked arguments regarding how Bitcoin is a zero-sum scam, a ponzi, etc. That's not the kind of behaviour I would expect from an intellectual, that's the kind of behaviour I would expect from a troll.

Do you want to contribute in any meaningful way to this community? Then STFU a little while, read a learn and try to ADD to what has already been said instead of repeating the same old songs mixing them with misconceptions and mistakes originating in the little knowledge you have of both the technology and the ecosystem.

And honestly: for a guy who is supposed to have a background in cryptography you have been pretty out of this world to arrive SO LATE to Bitcoin. Wake up Mr.Stolfi, we are in 2014. The good news is you didn't necessarily miss the train, just wake up, stop trolling and open your eyes.

Well, that is so crazy that is almost unbelievable IMO. If those leaked documents are even half true (which I cannot believe), then the people at Gox are just a bunch of criminals. Customer funds are just that, customer funds: and they should be kept completely segregated and should be 100% independent of the company's accounts. If they are considering customer funds "assets" they probably deserve to rot a long time in jail.

We don't know. That's why I said, two times: Somebody inside MtGox wants us to believe it will be sold/acquired imminently.

They want us to believe that, what we don't know if it is true or not.

Excuse me? What investment is promising 10,000% returns in 3 years? Please source.

You are trying very hard to embarass yourself, Mr. Stelfi - again and again and again.

Plus, you have just written that Bitcoin is NOT a good investment right now... Are you shure? Price is almost half of its ATH. Let's speak in one year from now, ok?

Sure.

Well, if NOW it is not the time to buy, when it is?

I sure as hell regret not having money on the exchanges right now. I sent two biggish wires today, but when they hit both Stamp and Kraken it might not be the optimal moment. I would have bought a lot of $400 coins earlier today if I had the fiat there.

Agreed. Either Karpeles have been already negotiating with the potential buyer for many months, the due-diligence is already finalized, etc. and during the shitstorm Karpeles made a very good offer (like 50% of what the company would be worth on the paper) to the buyer, or this doesn't make sense at all.

I'm on stamp, but not trading much... Just buying ATM. Buying quite a lot in fact. Just wired a very consistent amount today to both Bitstamp and Kraken. I'll place most of my bids on the $400-500 range as I'm hoping for a shitstorm on the media and hopefully also a lot of panic sales from the noobs. Wonderful time to go long. I will also leave a 30% of my fiat on both exchanges with bids below $400 in case the shit really hits the fans.

This is a golden opportunity to increase one's stash IMO.

What is 100% sure is that Gox itself wants us to believe that, they have been spreading many hints, see:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=486925.msg5363981#msg5363981

Why the bad feeling? I doubt I qualify as a whale (even if in this thread 500 coins are considered "walls" some times), but I certainly cashed out Gox months ago.