What have we all learnt from the Mt Gox incident?

[Samantha2011]

1. Flocking to a central exchange to trade a decentralised currency is a bad idea.

Continue on ...

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[byronbb]

If that exchange was robust we would have no problems. We need an established Forex site to take on BTC and all of this BS is the past.

[EpicFail]

That many people here are extremely naive ...

1) thinking that rolling back trades will somehow "make things right",
2) assuming that all BUY trades involved only people buying the stolen coins, and therefore it is rightious to reverse all BUY trades,
3) assuming that Mt. Gox is a closed system and that nobody did any offsetting trades on Trade Hill or even offline as a result of the trades that cleared in Mt Gox (e.g. arbitrage)
4) what about people who sold into the panic at $10 but after reversal the market re-opens at $5? Was it fair to reverse their trades?

Those of us who have worked on real exchanges know that no matter how you do a rollback some innocent party will get screwed in the end.  Usually it is the small guys who get screwed, never the GS, JPMs or the Smith Barneys. Looks like the same thing will happen here. The 500K BTC guy would get most of his coins back but the small timers who traded on good faith during the plunge won't.

Remember: not every trade involved some lucky dweeb buying "stolen" coins at 0.1.

Hopefully few innocent people will be affected this time round.

If Mt. Gox wants to be taken seriously this should be the first and last time they do this kind of bullshit.

[Litt]

Nothing really other than everyone need to be calm. same old story and just another hump we were gonna have to get over. We knew it wasn't gonna be a smooth ride and there are still much rougher terrain ahead. The community really need to buckle down and get through these things without too much fuss. The media is already going to do that for us. The publicity isn't bad anyways negative or not.

[Alex Beckenham]

If Mt. Gox wants to be taken seriously this should be the first and last time they do this kind of bullshit.

Oanda is taken seriously. They have also been known to roll back trades.

Speaking of Oanda, it's be insanely awesome if they added BTC as a currency to their systems.

[cypherdoc]

how many times have we seen the NYSE reverse trades and in only one direction; back up after a flash crash.  they've been guilty of doing it so many times in the last several years. "fat finger" trades they call them.  only when its in favor of Wall St traders!

banning short selling esp. of financials comes to mind as well as a slew of financial rule changes when things weren't going the way of Wall St. 

[hugolp]

If that exchange was robust we would have no problems. We need an established Forex site to take on BTC and all of this BS is the past.

Yes, and having an honest and omnipotent politician would make government viable.

The problem is that neither of those exist, and that is why you want decentralization.

[airdata]

maybe you're right.

Maybe a few bitcoin-wealthy early adopters should pool together some of their resources and get another exchange or 2 going.

Allocate a good percentage of the budget to security of course.

[marcus_of_augustus]

What have we all learnt from the Mt Gox incident?

Continue on ...

Never leave home without an umbrella or a condom in your wallet ..... ?

Sounds MtGox was as much an accident waiting to happen as allinvain's doomed mining operation. Also learned never be an early adopter with risky crypto-currenices.

The next, best exchange will be awesome ... onwards and upwards.

[oneforall]

the roll back was the only choice, you can't let someone lose millions of dollars so other ppl can get free coins. think it out objectively and you will see the choice was obviously. its better for us all for it to be this way. it doesnt matter what side of the fiasco you were on.

[imperi]

Trading decentralized currency at a centralized site is one of the funniest things ever. I've been part of this, but it's still really funny.

[tulkos]

Expect more growing pains as the popularity increases.

[GeniuSxBoY]

It's not the fact that it's a centralized site, it's just one of the very few sites out there that it's worth using bitcoins to make money.


Other than that, bitcoins haven't stabilized long enough to have a trusted value needed to buy and sell with.

[TraderTimm]

Those of us who have worked on real exchanges know that no matter how you do a rollback some innocent party will get screwed in the end.  Usually it is the small guys who get screwed, never the GS, JPMs or the Smith Barneys. Looks like the same thing will happen here. The 500K BTC guy would get most of his coins back but the small timers who traded on good faith during the plunge won't.


If Mt. Gox wants to be taken seriously this should be the first and last time they do this kind of bullshit.

Hey, you. Over there. Yeah, the one who talks big and doesn't know jack.

Guess what the exchanges do every day they have a mini-flash-crash? That's right, there are plenty of smaller stocks that trade say at $12 that get smacked down to 30 cents. The HFT guys are the usual culprit, but all the trades get busted within a certain percentage. Mt. Gox is just following best practices here.

Sorry you don't get it - but you would if you really did 'work on a real exchange'.

Take my trading cards clerk, and get me a hoagie while you run that crap to the back office. Clerk Failpile.

[true]

I've learned that watching people freak out when shit goes down, start speculating on what happened, then spouting their shit as fact is lulzy.

Lots of great stories.

Can't wait to see it again.

lulz

[flug]

1. Flocking to a central exchange to trade a decentralised currency is a bad idea.

Continue on ...

+1

We definitely need LOTS more exchanges and different ways to convert between BTC and other currencies. That's part of the maturing process of the Bitcoin ecosystem.

[rebuilder]

Always use your spam mail account (you have one, right?) for, well, pretty much everything except personal e-mail. I feel sorry for those who had e-mail accounts they actually use revealed this way.

[ironwolf]

Aside from the fact that I'm glad I used a unique password for my Mt. Gox account, I look at this incident in much the same way I look at the Amazon Web Services outage of a couple months ago (which I was also affected by.) Some AWS users left claiming they had lost faith in Amazon's ability to keep their systems up, even though up to that time Amazon's record had been exemplary. My feeling was and still is that this sort of thing would only strengthen Amazon, and that while failures do inevitably happen, this failure would be extremely unlikely to happen ever again, and a whole class of related potential failures would never happen at all. So, unless Amazon, and by the same argument Mt. Gox, shows a repeated pattern of failures in the same category, I think it wise to stick with them.

There's a lot of truth in Nietzsche's statement, "That which does not kill me makes me stronger."

[rocksalt]

i just received a mail from MtGox with a self extracting archive ( .exe ) purporting to be a certificate to help combat this.... no way am i opening it, it got captured by my spam services anyhow but really.. who the hell is gonna trust an executable from them now ?

[ironwolf]

...who the hell is gonna trust an executable from them now ?

It's not from them, and who the hell trusts executables sent in an e-mail by anyone anyway?