[2014-03-18] MtGox and the Magic Bank

[hjbuell]

http://blogcritics.org/mt-gox-and-the-magic-bank/

I wrote a Bitcoin article about the fantasy MtGox was founded on, and why the trick worked.

[1715163773]

1715163773

[segeln]

nice article !

[hjbuell]

Thanks much for the comments Segeln. It was due to be published almost two weeks ago, but real life snagged me, so I wasn't able to get it online.

[zakoliverz]

In the vast online world of bitcoin, great content production intent on this article .

[xsmoffx]

The best article I have recently read about MtGox, it is sober to the situation: about Ponzi and that MtGox is a bubble

[hjbuell]

Thanks all. I did my best to be honest and objective, while working to explain to anyone who is serious about finance, that Gox was built from a card trading store. It's completely unrealistic for anyone to judge Bitcoin by the example of what literally amounts to a Dungeon Master. Google spell check trying to correct 'Karpales' to 'Sparkles' was just icing on the cake. 

Your comments and views are very much appreciated.

Add - I left it out of the article, but I genuinely feel for those who did lose their ass with Gox. Nothing I wrote is intended to be at all disrespectful or inconsiderate of them or their loss. Rather, the article is intended to 'hopefully' open the eyes of the financial community to what really happened, and hopefully strengthen Bitcoin and further adoption.

Cheers,
 H

[Massimo80]

Nice article.

Unfortunately, the Bitcoin ecosystem is full of completely unqualified (and sometimes quite unreliable) people who started providing services while the whole thing was only a playground for nerds, and then found themselves managing relevant sums of money and completely lacking the technical skills and business experience (not to mention the moral integrity) to do that.

Mt.Gox may have been the biggest fiasco in the Bitcoin history, but it's definitely not the only one. I just can't forget the guy at Bitcoin-24 (biggest EUR exchange for a while, much more relevant than Mt.Gox in the EUR market) who after having been in business for months was still asking on a developer forum how to properly round decimal numbers and how to avoid concurrency issues when querying a database...