Mt. Gox Rant/Comments/An Open Letter to Mt. Gox

[zhalox]

Disclaimer/Admission: I wrote the following "rant" this morning in much frustration & anger, and I sincerely hope no one takes offense, or takes anything personally, but do believe some of the points mentioned herein contain legitimate concerns and feedback regarding the current situation of Mt. Gox.

Please feel free to add more concerns and feedback as you wish.  When this is done, I think it would be beneficial to share the useful information with MagicalTux so he can see some of the concerns of his user base.


<rant>
Specific to today, 2011-06-14
I don't think this is just me, but Mt. Gox seems to be completely down for over an hour.  At first, I couldn't log in to my account, and now I can't visit the website at all.  It doesn't work on my laptop, my smartphone or anything else.  I have significant funds in there that I need access to...  Does anyone know what the heck is going on?

UPDATE: It appears they were being DDoS'ed as per an updated message when attempting to visit the site.  I hope they get this fixed ASAP, I really hoped they would have found better hosting by now.  I still can't log in to my account though


General complaints
In addition, Mt. Gox's WebSockets are down WAY too much.  It seems like half the time, Clark Moody's awesome WebSockets market depth and time & sales live feeds don't work (not his fault) and my indispensable SierraChart plugin's live feed stops working too (not slush's fault).  I am really getting tired of putting up with all of this.  With Mt. Gox making many thousands of $$$ per day in hefty fees, I really think they should be able to do a much better job ($23,439,882.93 traded in last 30 days * .0065 = $152,359.24 in the last month alone.  I wonder how they are using all that money...).

In addition, I am in support of making dark pools visible to those who wish to see them (or at least making them separate from the open market because it hurts us poor traders who are trying to break through resistance/support lines, see here: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=16622.0).

As previously mentioned, I do believe the fees are a bit high, especially for the poor condition and lack of features on the site - Mt. Gox could really use a major overhaul (not just the graphical interface [or lack thereof], but the core features - it still looks like a archaic beta site from 2001, providing me with lovely SQL errors every day and typos/poor English), including the other issues mentioned already by other users on the Bitcoin Forums, such as adding columns showing all the fees, and more detailed profit/loss accounting, etc.

One of the most annoying things for me lately is that if I want to update an open order, I am forced to cancel my order and make an entirely new one rather than editing my open orders.  I also forced to manually refresh my page half the time because after executing trades, my buying power/holdings are not updated correctly (example, yesterday I lost 11 BTC or so just because there was an order that apparently didn't show up and the order was filled without my knowledge about it until late afterwards when I logged into my phone and my BTC had already dropped significantly).

I have several more concerns/ideas I could share, but I'm too tired/frustrated to think of them at the moment :/

</rant>

[YoYa]

This!

https://mtgox.zendesk.com/forums/20102146-feature-requests

[Sukrim]

Just switch somewhere else.

Tradehill, Bitcoin7...

[Littleshop]

General complaints
In addition, Mt. Gox's WebSockets are down WAY too much.  It seems like half the time, Clark Moody's awesome WebSockets market depth and time & sales live feeds don't work (not his fault) and my indispensable SierraChart plugin's live feed stops working too (not slush's fault).  I am really getting tired of putting up with all of this.  With Mt. Gox making many thousands of $$$ per day in hefty fees, I really think they should be able to do a much better job ($23,439,882.93 traded in last 30 days * .0065 = $152,359.24 in the last month alone.  I wonder how they are using all that money...).

Actually I think they make more then that.  They charge both the buyer and seller the same .65 fee, so it is 1.30%.  So more like $300,000 this month if I am doing my math right.

I would like to see a lower fee and a better site as well, but I have to thank MTGOX because the level and complexity of the attacks against them are serious.  They are under all kinds of attacks, flooding, DDOS, brute force etc. 

[dr.bitcoin]

I would like to see MtGox make the daily/monthly limits go away. No serious business can function with a $10,000/month withdrawal limit!

[Yankee (BitInstant)]

General complaints
In addition, Mt. Gox's WebSockets are down WAY too much.  It seems like half the time, Clark Moody's awesome WebSockets market depth and time & sales live feeds don't work (not his fault) and my indispensable SierraChart plugin's live feed stops working too (not slush's fault).  I am really getting tired of putting up with all of this.  With Mt. Gox making many thousands of $$$ per day in hefty fees, I really think they should be able to do a much better job ($23,439,882.93 traded in last 30 days * .0065 = $152,359.24 in the last month alone.  I wonder how they are using all that money...).

Actually I think they make more then that.  They charge both the buyer and seller the same .65 fee, so it is 1.30%.  So more like $300,000 this month if I am doing my math right.

I would like to see a lower fee and a better site as well, but I have to thank MTGOX because the level and complexity of the attacks against them are serious.  They are under all kinds of attacks, flooding, DDOS, brute force etc. 

I think they are redesigning there site. Theres a logo contest for mtgox on logotournament

[zhalox]

TradeHill (at the time of this post) significantly lacks the features that I get from using Mt. Gox (i.e., no SierraCharts plugin [from slush] and no real time time & sales with order book/market depth via WebSockets [from Clark Moody]).  Plus, the 'charts' look like crap (no offense).  The TradeHill market has too little volume, so I don't feel very comfortable there at this point until they get more features and programmers start making useful tools with the API's.

Bitcoin7.com looks promising, but needs more time, wider use, and useful tools.

[rb2k]

Bitcoin7.com looks promising, but needs more time, wider use, and useful tools.

They are storing coins as floats... you really shouldn't go there

[testerx]

I only recently started trading and now I see how ridiculously high the fees actually are compared to normal day-trading of equities.  The flat percentage is ok if you just want to trade a couple coins but on larger orders it becomes ridiculous and probably holds back a lot of orders.

[Justsomeforumuser]

If any of these sites / exchanges / pseudobanks want to be taken serious, they need to have an actual fund insurance on accounts and be registered, audited.

[Justsomeforumuser]

I only recently started trading and now I see how ridiculously high the fees actually are compared to normal day-trading of equities.  The flat percentage is ok if you just want to trade a couple coins but on larger orders it becomes ridiculous and probably holds back a lot of orders.

A normal bank will charge you around 5 cent for a real world money conversion between the most liquid pair out there, EUR/USD. That's 500 pips spread compared to a 0-1 pip spread of a "daytrading"/ margin based broker.

So?

[Justsomeforumuser]

If any of these sites / exchanges / pseudobanks want to be taken serious, they need to have an actual fund insurance on accounts and be registered, audited.

From June 17th.

Wow, talk about being clairvoyant.

[zhalox]

How interesting/coincidental that I posted this last week, and today Mt. Gox announced an epic security breach with all of our usernames/emails/password hashes released to the internets (including mine)?  I still believe there's hope for Mt. Gox (and for the other exchanges, such as TradeHill, and even the new Bitcoin7.com), and I'm sure the team at Mt. Gox is working hard to resolve the problem.

Hopefully, this event will be good for Bitcoin's long term prospects, and will teach the community at least two things:

Hopefully, noobs will learn from this event and start using 20-40 character passwords with lowercase, uppercase, symbols, and numbers (some 10-15 character passwords are crackable within a matter of days btw).

In addition, hopefully this teaches the community as a whole to unite, and for exchanges to start hiring REAL hackers/security experts (those of you who know who you are).  Those of us in the community who are knowledgeable security experts/hackers (not to be confused with malicious crackers) should write letters to the exchanges, offering to help the Bitcoin community as a whole by patching vulnerabilities/weaknesses, including, but not limited to CSRF, SQL injections, DDoS, MITM, etc.