Official End of Mt Gox thread

[Bobsurplus]

Guess who´s next

+1
very logical

Oh boy.

[Johnshpon3]

Don't lie and make panic!
I just log-on into my Bitstamp account and Bitcoin withdrawals are open.
I think you posted this print-screen about week or two old.

[igorr]

Don't lie and make panic!
I just log-on into my Bitstamp account and Bitcoin withdrawals are open.
I think you posted this print-screen about week or two old.

It is today screenshot !

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=476614.0

[Tzupy]

If you don't have 2FA enabled, that's what happens.

[ledmaniak]

So, when is the next announcement?! 

[igorr]

So, when is the next announcement?! 

The same as MtGox !

[kkaspar]

I'm surprised to see the lack of discussion on the subject, on how the entire bitcoin market system will get a big hit in confidence, when MtGox turns out insolvent.
The bitcoin market system always had this halo of an open source community around it. That the community consists of idealistic and therefor trustworthy people. Those who have dealt with bitcoin in depth, know better, but to the outsiders, the market system has looked relatively honest. When MtGox turns out to be insolvent, and news will show things like how bitcoin.org linked MtGox as the main recommended exchange, then this halo will disappear. Bitcoin will be linked more as an tool of those "exchange" operators to scam people out of their money. It's funny to see how most seem to miss that threat.

[Johnshpon3]

I have Bitstamp open at this very moment (16:46 UTC). Bitcoin withdrawals are open.

[chesthing]

So, when is the next announcement?! 

Maybe we'll get a postcard from Tahiti?

[jaybny]

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but if people buy bitcoins on Gox now at $100, they are actually buying bitcoins aren't they?
It is off blockchain so there is no way of knowing if Gox are naked shorting...

no they are buying goxBTC which may or may not be thin air.

[sgbett]

has anyone successfully got any funds onto gox in the past few days?

yes. sepa took about 48 hours excluding weekends (and I think monday was a holiday in US? maybe elsewhere).

just wondering... you wired money to gox to pick up coins cheap, which makes sense maybe economically, if the chance of total failure is outweighed by the chance of getting the coins out of gox and the possible profit you could make on that.

But you don't see any  problem at all that, by doing so, you're lending gox legitimacy that they very much don't deserve anymore? I mean, I know, it's a market, morality has no place in here but... really?

I'm not a moral arbiter. Especially not given that I don't actually *know* what is going on at gox.

I'm amazed how many people claim that they do.

Here's just one scenario out of a hat.

Gox knows that by allowing BTC withdrawals, they could potentially double pay (yes due to their own flawed algorithm - but still a risk all the same), and this would threaten solvency/customer deposits.

What needs to happen is that the free market will decide. If people are happy to tolerate gox's way of doing things they will carry on, if they don't gox will die.

If people want to make it a moral crusade that's their call. To me its just business.

I could say something about the paradox of the self-interested actor, something along the lines of the dominant strategy not necessarily leading to the optimal result for the individual that chose that strategy, but I would sound like a self-righteous, hypocritical dick. Carry on then.

Tragedy of the commons? true enough.

Sorry if i sound callous I'm just taking the 4-1 odds against mtgox crashing. I don't really share the seemingly common belief that what gox are doing/not doing is inherently good or bad for bitcoin. I think its just all 'stuff' like pirate wasn't good or bad for bitcoin, he was just bad for the people that fell for it. Like Madoff wasn't 'bad' for the dollar etc i dunno what i really think, just kind of riding the waves.

[proudhon]

So, I do feel bad for everyone with any asset on MtGox right now.  Nevertheless, after so many goxxings and on the whole bitcoin community, plus the fact that Gox has held over 150 of my bitcoins (and tens of thousands of others') hostage since early 2012 related to the bitcoinica debacle, this is how I feel about the potential of the current situation...

[chesthing]

sgbett, how much did you just send to Gox?

[DeathAndTaxes]

this time again its a real joke: letting no money out, not freezing trading...

They make money off of trades.  They don't make money off of fixing their withdraws. 

Perfect system for MtGox is that they never open withdraws and traders convert all their balances to trading fees and MtGox.

If the value of depositor funds is x and MtGox collects 0.5% (both sides) on each trade then after trades equal to 1000x ( 0.995^1000), 99% of depositor funds will have been converted into fees.  MtGox does a single one time withdraw for the remaining 1% and clears the books quasi legally.

Pretty much the same concept that results in poker sites ending up with 70% to 90% of the funds deposited.

[zeroday]

From Gox announcement:

we had to relocate MtGox to our previous office building in Shibuya

Confirmed bad news. Gox is moving towards DOGE at Shiba headquarters.

[oda.krell]

has anyone successfully got any funds onto gox in the past few days?

yes. sepa took about 48 hours excluding weekends (and I think monday was a holiday in US? maybe elsewhere).

just wondering... you wired money to gox to pick up coins cheap, which makes sense maybe economically, if the chance of total failure is outweighed by the chance of getting the coins out of gox and the possible profit you could make on that.

But you don't see any  problem at all that, by doing so, you're lending gox legitimacy that they very much don't deserve anymore? I mean, I know, it's a market, morality has no place in here but... really?

I'm not a moral arbiter. Especially not given that I don't actually *know* what is going on at gox.

I'm amazed how many people claim that they do.

Here's just one scenario out of a hat.

Gox knows that by allowing BTC withdrawals, they could potentially double pay (yes due to their own flawed algorithm - but still a risk all the same), and this would threaten solvency/customer deposits.

What needs to happen is that the free market will decide. If people are happy to tolerate gox's way of doing things they will carry on, if they don't gox will die.

If people want to make it a moral crusade that's their call. To me its just business.

I could say something about the paradox of the self-interested actor, something along the lines of the dominant strategy not necessarily leading to the optimal result for the individual that chose that strategy, but I would sound like a self-righteous, hypocritical dick. Carry on then.

Tragedy of the commons? true enough.

Sorry if i sound callous I'm just taking the 4-1 odds against mtgox crashing. I don't really share the seemingly common belief that what gox are doing/not doing is inherently good or bad for bitcoin. I think its just all 'stuff' like pirate wasn't good or bad for bitcoin, he was just bad for the people that fell for it. Like Madoff wasn't 'bad' for the dollar etc i dunno what i really think, just kind of riding the waves.

A small part of me wonders if, not just in Bitcoin valuation, but other ventures as well, we hit a local maximum because of our choices without ever being aware of the possibility that, had we acted different, we would have reached a higher point... but that's idle speculation.

Hence: I have no good reason to complain from a moral point of view. Objection withdrawn.

But I don't need to tell you that you'll get zero sympathy if you get burned on there. I've read enough of your posts to know that you're well aware of the risks and such. Good luck though

[BTC4Victory]

Quoting this article solely because the bolded & italicized sentence was inadvertently awesome.  When all the dust has settled, I think "to Touch the Pink Cow" needs to become a euphemism for having a massively successful business -- with almost literally a license to print money -- that you somehow manage to completely f*ck up and drive into the ground merely because you're a staggeringly incompetent douchebag with your head stuck up your a$$.

By Takashi Mochizuki and Eleanor Warnock

TOKYO--Just six months ago, Mark Karpelès was sitting on top of the world. Mt. Gox, his Tokyo-based platform that had started as an exchange for Magic trading cards, had in a short time become the world's dominant platform for exchanging the new big thing--bitcoins.

Cut to a snowy February morning in Tokyo, and you find Mr. Karpelès trying to walk past a bitcoin trader holding a sign outside Mt. Gox's offices in the hip Shibuya neighborhood, asking: "MT. GOX--WHERE IS OUR MONEY?"

The trader, Kolin Burges, who had flown in from London, was only one of many customers of the company who have been pressing the trading platform to disclose more about its financial health after it froze customer withdrawals on Feb. 7.

The travails of Mt. Gox illustrate the convulsions of the bitcoin market as the first generation of companies trading the virtual currency face growing technical and security challenges.

Chris Larsen, chief executive of San Francisco-based Ripple Labs Inc., a startup associated with another virtual currency, ripples, likened the convulsions as the bitcoin market expands to the early days of the Internet, when it wasn't clear that the World Wide Web would really catch on.

Then, "it all just seemed like the craziest stuff--who would ever use this?--and now it's absolutely in the fabric of every enterprise on earth," he said.

Mr. Larsen developed Ripple with another bitcoin entrepreneur, Jed McCaleb, the founder of Mt. Gox, who sold it to Mr. Karpelès in 2011. The name Mt. Gox, which came from the Magic card game the company originally dealt in before Mr. McCaleb turned it onto bitcoins, is short for Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange.

Mt. Gox has been wrestling with problems since earlier this year, when it halted withdrawals in dollars.

Also in May, some of Mt. Gox's funds were seized by U.S. regulators, who said the exchange wasn't properly registered in the U.S. Mt. Gox said in a statement last month that it is has been properly registered as a money-services business in the U.S. since the end of June.

After Mt. Gox again abruptly halted customer withdrawals on Feb. 7, it blamed its issues on a glitch in the bitcoin software.

On Feb. 10, Mt. Gox said it had been hit by fraudulent requests for payment by users exploiting a feature in the core protocol known as "transaction malleability."

Initially, many in the bitcoin community argued that Mt. Gox had simply failed to use the correct internal procedures to protect its accounts. The next day, however, a hacking attack crippled other bitcoin-exchange platforms and raised questions about the security of the global network for trading the virtual currency.

Asked why the company hadn't addressed customers' concern sooner, Mr. Karpelès responded in an email interview with The Wall Street Journal on Monday: "I assume you refer to the malleability issue. We sincerely apologize for this incident; however, please understand that we are NOT the developers of Bitcoin." He added, "We are very surprised that anyone could fault MtGox instead of the bitcoin software."

However, he said, "We deeply apologize for any delays in our responses."

After Mr. Karpelès, who was running an IT company in Tokyo, bought Mt. Gox from Mr. McCaleb in 2011, Mt. Gox became the world's biggest bitcoin exchange by volume, with more than 80% of bitcoin trades, according to Bitcoinity.org, a service that tracks rates on various exchanges. During that time, the price of a single bitcoin rose from 92 cents to a peak of more than $1,147 last December, based on figures from CoinDesk, a bitcoin-data provider based in London.

Amid the turmoil surrounding Mt. Gox, CoinDesk removed Mt. Gox from its benchmark bitcoin index early last week. The index, which now includes just Slovenia-based Bitstamp and BTC-e of Bulgaria, stood at $624.63 in New York afternoon trading Monday, while Mt. Gox-traded bitcoin was valued at just $294.20. Its share of bitcoin trades had dropped to 25% on Monday, according to Bitcoinity.org.

But aside from the lower value of its bitcoins, investors are increasingly concerned about the status of their Mt. Gox accounts. The company's halt of bitcoin transfers to outside accounts led investors to speculate on online forums that the company had its bitcoins stolen by hackers or that it was out of cash and would default.

Tomoaki Ushida, who runs an IT consulting firm in Tokyo, has given up hope of recovering the two bitcoins he had in his Mt. Gox account. "I try to convince myself that I paid for a good lesson," he said. "If I ever get them returned, I'm lucky."

In the email interview, Mr. Karpelès responded to questions about the company's solvency or protection for customers' funds by saying that the matter is confidential. However, he said the company had discussed its business model with Japanese authorities "to ensure that we are operating within the law here."

At a weekly meeting Thursday of Mt. Gox investors and other members of Tokyo's small, tightknit bitcoin community at a bar about a 10-minute walk from Mt. Gox's headquarters, some 30 bitcoiners talked about bitcoins and exchanged the currency using cellphone-readable bar codes. Some members reminisced about tipping burlesque dancers in bitcoins at a bar called the Pink Cow in Tokyo's foreigner-rich Roppongi neighborhood that accepts bitcoins for payment.

But the conversation revolved mostly around Mt. Gox and whether the exchange would be able to honor deposits. Organizers had extended an invitation to Mr. Karpelès but said they didn't receive a response.

Ken Shishido, one of the group's organizers who works in the telecom industry, said, "Everyone's question is whether the company still has everyone's bitcoin and cash. That's a very critical thing we need to know."

Mr. Burges, the London investor, was among the bitcoiners Thursday night. The next morning, outside Mt. Gox's offices, he managed to get in a brief confrontation with Mr. Karpelès. "You still have everyone's bitcoin?" Mr. Burges asked while Mr. Karpelès tried to navigate around him holding a Starbucks cup and an umbrella.

In the wider Japanese business community, bitcoins aren't widely used or even well-known. Japanese officials are cautious about making any comments about bitcoins as they wait for the Bank of Japan to finish a study about the virtual currency. Still, some Japan-based lawyers say certain restrictions, especially on exchange platforms, should be considered in order to prevent criminal use of the currency, such as for money-laundering.

"I believe that regulating exchanges would be the best way to address these problems," said So Saito, a lawyer at the Tokyo law firm of Nishimura & Asahi.

Meanwhile, the turmoil at Mt. Gox has even touched the Pink Cow, home to the burlesque dancers, which has switched to another bitcoin payment process called BitPay.

Mt. Gox transactions are "taking an unacceptable length of time right now, so we are taking another route," said owner Traci Consoli. "Hopefully, a more stable system will evolve as it grows." [Suspicious link removed]j.com/article/BT-CO-20140217-704805.html

[DeathAndTaxes]

"at last"

If there ever was an entity that met the definition of a "zombie exchange" it would MtGox.  They have done so many things which would have annihilated other companies a long time ago.  The only thing which historically would have been a worse bet than a multi-year short on Bitcoin would be betting on the demise of MtGox.

I am not sure where MtGox finds the neverending stream of new marks willing to relentlessly pour cash and coin into their coffers but no matter what happens they always seem to do. They are the only exchange to have a song written about them ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2ku1A5Ox8U ) and getting "goxxed" has been a community term which has been generalized to events beyond the exchange. 

I mean maybe that blue ball has magical powers?

[MatTheCat]

GOX is a total and utter disaster.

There is no good part of it. The list of failures, scams, and setbacks continues.

Everything bitcoin ends up being a scam or con in some way or other. Instead of being a decentralized currency, bitcoin has turned into a shyster magnet.

Which is why governments had to move to clamp down on the wildcat currencies that sprung up across Great Britain in the 1800's. Hence the rule I think instated by Robert Peel that allowed only the Bank of England to print bank notes and only the Royal Mint to produce coinage.

[Bobsurplus]

I death blow is right around the corner for gox, they will slip under 130 in the next few minutes and after that its a quick slide to zero zero land.