But I'm still scratching my head: Why do they restrict the accounts so much that people can't even submit their verification documents?!?!
Mt. Gox couldn't find their ass with both hands.
Unfortuntely Mark is over his head, and he does not recognize it. Self insight is a beautiful things. Most people having an overview, would be both able to plan ahead, and hire or make alliances with other parties who can add the competence Gox does not have.
This is a red thread through everything that Gox does.
Read this:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/leoking/2014/02/13/mt-gox-ceo-mark-karpeles-responds-to-widespread-bitcoin-criticism/FORBES: Was Mt Gox’s coding to blame, and are other exchanges having the same problem?
Mark Karpeles: First, you need to understand that the Bitcoin implementation we use in MtGox was created back in 2011. The bitcoin client is not meant to handle the kind of load MtGox has and was having more and more troubles, lagging and crashing. We created our own implementation to solve those issues and to offer a better flexibility to our customers.
Over time Bitcoin changed and started implementing changes that would require people using previous versions of the software to upgrade. While we followed most of those update we were more and more busy and couldn’t keep up with all the changes.
My emphasis in bold. To me it is 100% logic to hire dedicated professionals to deal with the situation so that everything is kept up to date. This is crucial if you want to run a serious business. The time to hire such professionals is when you see that you're having a problem keeping up with everything. After all, any person can only do so much in one day. No company that is expanding is doing this without adding more employees.
At the very core of MtGox's business is the exchange of bitcoins for fiat money, and being able to withdraw both fiat and bitcoins. So, making this a crucial point of their business is paramount.
Considering everything they've earned in fees, they should have enough money to get their shit together. Maybe they're insolvent because of running costs and embezzlement done by
Govt. Gox has done little or nothing to prove that they're solvent. A company of their size should be able to hire lawyers that could find solutions to make the money flow more smoothly with banks.
Mark have a hard time trusting somebody, and he's probably a nice guy, but in business that's not good enough. And the market will punish those who do not do a great job.
In addition, there are people and companies that have their money tied up in MtGox. People who showed MtGox trust. How can these businesses trust MtGox again? How can they trust MtGox not to randomly at some point again freeze your assets?
What contingency plans to they have, if any? If Mark's 'falling' out of a skyscraper or is jailed, what will happen to Gox? Are the cold wallets lost forever?
With ongoing cases, and customers who are more and more angry - having your money/bitcoins at MtGox seems like a very very bad idea.
MtGox have with their actions damaged the reputation of the entire bitcoin system. If they wanted to, they could've consulted with the Bitcoin Fundation, developers and PR experts to best handle this. How could they possibly think that
announcing what they did would not negatively influence the price?
The good thing that comes out of this however, is probably that many people will move to other exchanges, thus decentralizing the exchange market more, plus that the issues going on with trancation malleability will be fixed or at least worked around.
Perhaps that announcing this problem was the only way to actually have the devs to anything about it? As Gmaxwell said (if I remember correctly), this was not on their top 10 list of things to fix. But it is now.
Sometimes, the only way to have people act to solve a problem is to show them that a proposed problem is a problem in reality. Some people complain that Gox should've worked silently with the developers to fix this, but not announce it to the world, but the question is would they really have prioritized it then?
