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."
You're comparing
Amazon.com with
Magic The Gathering Online eXchange.
One of them is the biggest success of the internet age that employs the most talented computer scientists in the world to tackle the most difficult business and technical challenges on the internet.
The other is a glorified calculator, providing a service that was already perfected long ago, in a very amateur and incompetent way. They've made errors that freshman computer science students know not to make. They've proven their deep incompetence.
AWS went down because AWS is like the space shuttle of internet technology. It is cutting edge: AWS EBS is trying to solve a problem that most other experts literally consider impossible. Despite their downtime, they haven't even violated their SLA.
Magic The Gather Online eXchange is too incompetent to use bcrypt and not expose their fucking accounts database to insecure parties. Magic The Gathering doesn't even
have an SLA. Because they are fucking incompetent and untrustworthy.
AWS
did violate their SLA and did in fact compensate customers like me in the wake of their outage. I expect that Mt. Gox will also do right by their customers, including formalizing some sort of guarantee if necessary, although I wasn't aware that commodity exchanges had SLAs.
Meanwhile, although you're right that AWS and Mt. Gox aren't really comparable in terms of
current scale, my point was not about scale, but about adaptability.
And besides, Amazon started out as just an online bookstore. It will be interesting to see where Mt. Gox is 5 or 10 years from now. You think they'll be dead. I'll wait and see.
Early days yet, people. Growing pains are expected.
