http://www.marketwatch.com/story/regulator-to-sound-alarm-on-bitcoin-2014-02-24?mod=wsj_share_tweetJoseph Borg, state securities administrator in Alabama and a past president of the North American State Securities Administrators Association, says he plans to issue a consumer alert Tuesday, suggesting that if consumers and investors have trouble redeeming bitcoins or cashing out of their accounts, they stop trading—or adding to their holdings on account—until issues are resolved.
Borg has been involved in a wide range of high-profile cases in his 20 years on the Alabama Securities Commission perhaps most notably pushing for the formation of the multi-state task force that ultimately shut down Stratton Oakmont, the investment firm that was the basis for the recent movie “The Wolf of Wall Street.”
That’s particularly bad news for Mt. Gox, the largest bitcoin exchange, as Borg says his move was prompted by seeing a string of correspondence showing the frustrations some Gox customers have had in trying to get their money out.
After exchanging emails or chatting with about 60 crypto-currency traders (some have already moved away from BTC), it’s clear to me that issues related to making withdrawals from one’s accounts are all too common, with some describing the money being held in “Mt. Gox jail.”
Investors describe repeatedly being asked to provide information that any reputable financial company should not have had to request, such as linked bank account numbers, amounts on account with the exchange—both in bitcoins and in dollars—and more. Expedited requests—where customers were willing to pay fees of 5% to have withdrawals processed “manually”—wound up taking weeks and were going unfilled; Borg noted that, in this day and age, any suggestion that “manual processing” is faster is alarming.
Borg says he’ll cite recent reports from a survey from CoinDesk, a leading bitcoin news/information site, showing that nearly two-thirds of Mt. Gox users were still awaiting funds; some had waited as long as three months. He mentioned numerous examples—again, in some cases after looking at emails Mt. Gox users shared with MarketWatch—in saying, “If it was an investment we were talking about, we’d be moving to shut somebody down or to make them step up and take care of business properly.…If it took you a month or two or three to get your money out of a brand-name brokerage firm, you’d be worried that something bad is going on, and that’s with a firm where you really aren’t worried that your money is gone…Their experiences, honestly, look very bad.”
More than a dozen regulators I spoke with for this column said they saw issues exactly in line with Borg’s concerns, but felt that bitcoin exchanges were out of their purview, even if the customers—the theoretical victims if an exchange were to collapse—were in their state or region. It’s largely out of the regulators’ purview because most of the operators are located offshore.
“Dealing with these exchanges should be no different than dealing with your bank or your financial institution,” Borg said, “and we would tell you that you never do business with a bank that does not know you have money on account, or that is asking for your passwords or that doesn’t seem to remember the account links you established when you started the account. Now we are saying that you should never do business with a bitcoin exchange that has the same problems, or that has to ask you how much bitcoin you’ve got.”
Borg noted that the visible issues some investors have had with certain exchanges might have investors wondering if the entire crypto-currency world is a rip-off. But he stopped far short of that kind of warning, and said it’s entirely possible that investors’ experiences could vary entirely based on how they trade bitcoin, the same way stock investors would have different experiences using a respected brokerage firm and a boiler-room shop. Gox is arguably the biggest name, but it’s clear from my discussions with traders that it is also the operation that gets the least respect, particularly among veteran traders. Mt. Gox did not respond to a request for comment.
Borg did say—and suggest that his published warning will say—that the validity of any crypto-currency “is a matter of perception.”
The big issue is not the value of the currency so much as “execution” and “settlement” of transactions.
