MTGox Owes Us an Explanation For Yesterday and This is Why!

[bittenbob]

I am starting this thread since my post in the MTgox thread was deleted on the matter. Yesterday when the trading queues were not acting as they were the API was going haywire showing phantom transactions on all charting sites. I don't know why they would delete my post showing the phantom transactions unless they were trying to sweep this under the rug. For the largest exchange this is simply not acceptable.

If anyone is wondering what I am talking about look at the post I am quoting below and you will see a very thick line between 6 and 7 at the bottom when all charting sites were looping between 6 and 7 for about 20 minutes. If you look back at the charts now it is a single thin line so these transactions did not occur.

If this post is in the wrong forum then I am sorry moderators but this affects the bitcoin community as a whole since they are (for the time being) the largest exchange. With behavior like this they won't be the biggest for very long.

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[Rassah]

They've been pretty open and honest about all the crap they've gone through before, so I expect they would give an explanation if it was something that broke on their end. It could also just be someone dumping a whole bunch of coins on the market, and the automatic trading bots going haywire, trying to outbuy and outsell each other, causing the price to wildly oscillate.

[bittenbob]

They've been pretty open and honest about all the crap they've gone through before, so I expect they would give an explanation if it was something that broke on their end. It could also just be someone dumping a whole bunch of coins on the market, and the automatic trading bots going haywire, trying to outbuy and outsell each other, causing the price to wildly oscillate.

This thick line no longer exists. It didnt happen. The API was feeding all the charting sites with false information. Clearly MTGox read it because they had my post deleted and even posted in between my post and the deletion. They are sweeping this one under the rug. Prove me wrong MTGox and explain yourselves.

[Rockford99]

that banks were closed Monday and the post-Good Wife euphoria could easily be expected to wear off on Tuesday.  

My advice!  MAN UP and stop acting like a little leftwing do-gooder.  If you can't handle the swings, go buy T-bills with Grandma.

Yesterday’s price action doesn’t surprise me at all.

1.   Sunday was the Good Wife episode that a lot of hot money was trying to chase.
2.   Basically this move went from $2 to $7.20.  It is quite common for 40-60% of the move to get retraced in a bull market. Guess what? The decline ended right at the 50% midpoint.
3.   I consider this to be quite constructive.  Parabolic moves don’t last (see last June).  Retracements such as yesterday’s tend to wash out the weak hands and allow savvier more patient traders to load up at the hot-money speculators expense. Events like yesterday actually make it more likely for the up-move to persist.  People with strong hands dominate the market and the strong hands got paid yesterday.
4.   Also note that around the time of the show, BTC couldn’t really stay above $7.22 a high that was printed a few days earlier.  This also suggests that the market was “tired” or perhaps overloaded with latecomers and needed to get the dead wood cleaned out.
5.   IMO, the bulletin board and around-the-clock nature of bitcoin leaves it sort of vulnerable to quick (usually down) moves.  People don’t expect them to drop so far and a large offer can sweep out all the bids and cause the price to overshoot downwards.  It takes a while for the news of the price drop to get conveyed and after a while you would hope that new bids enter to capitalize on the overreaction – which is exactly what happened.

[bittenbob]

that banks were closed Monday and the post-Good Wife euphoria could easily be expected to wear off on Tuesday.  

My advice!  MAN UP and stop acting like a little leftwing do-gooder.  If you can't handle the swings, go buy T-bills with Grandma.

Yesterday’s price action doesn’t surprise me at all.

1.   Sunday was the Good Wife episode that a lot of hot money was trying to chase.
2.   Basically this move went from $2 to $7.20.  It is quite common for 40-60% of the move to get retraced in a bull market. Guess what? The decline ended right at the 50% midpoint.
3.   I consider this to be quite constructive.  Parabolic moves don’t last (see last June).  Retracements such as yesterday’s tend to wash out the weak hands and allow savvier more patient traders to load up at the hot-money speculators expense. Events like yesterday actually make it more likely for the up-move to persist.  People with strong hands dominate the market and the strong hands got paid yesterday.
4.   Also note that around the time of the show, BTC couldn’t really stay above $7.22 a high that was printed a few days earlier.  This also suggests that the market was “tired” or perhaps overloaded with latecomers and needed to get the dead wood cleaned out.
5.   IMO, the bulletin board and around-the-clock nature of bitcoin leaves it sort of vulnerable to quick (usually down) moves.  People don’t expect them to drop so far and a large offer can sweep out all the bids and cause the price to overshoot downwards.  It takes a while for the news of the price drop to get conveyed and after a while you would hope that new bids enter to capitalize on the overreaction – which is exactly what happened.

I am not complaining about the price since I made money and was not leveraged. Stop assuming because you are making an ass out of yourself.

I am upset about them feeding false information in their API without any sort of explanation.

[Rockford99]

or without the screwed-up API (I take your word for that).  Did your trades get "jumped" or not filled?  If not, then how were you harmed.

Granted I, like you, prefer accurate data. 

Just curious,  were you harmed?

[BitPay Business Solutions]

or without the screwed-up API (I take your word for that).  Did your trades get "jumped" or not filled?  If not, then how were you harmed.

Granted I, like you, prefer accurate data. 

Just curious,  were you harmed?

Orders were definitely crossed over.  I had buy orders at 5.50 and 5.05.  The 5.05 was partially filled, and the 5.50 was never filled.  Both are still sitting there open.

I am still waiting for an explanation from ZhouTong on that one.  And now today, every buy order I enter is getting NO RESERVE.  Orders should not be crossed over, that is broken and needs to be fixed.  Exchanges need to provide an accurate and reliable quote feed.  If they can't do that right, then they have major problems.

[Rockford99]

experiences with my outlier fills getting executed during the past 2-3 weeks.

[bittenbob]

I was not harmed at all by this but it definitely sent me into panic mode and now I question the validity of any API data sent to charting sites. Like I said I made money but that was because I was being patient. I almost bought back in early but was glad I waited. While the price was jumping on the chart there all my orders above $6 were not being executed. They were executed after those lines were removed and then the price really moved in those directions. I am not sure which caused which but I want an explanation. API is automated so this false data should not have been sent and something serious was up.

I am upset they removed my post which asked about this in a more polite manner and would like an explanation. This type of behavior will see then cease to be the largest exchange very soon IMO.

[theymos]

I am upset they removed my post which asked about this in a more polite manner and would like an explanation.

MtGox can't remove your posts on this forum, and I don't have any record of posts like that being deleted.

[casascius]

I observed this myself on the charts.

Having seen Adam@MtGox at CES last week, I felt sure he would be responsive to me.  I personally e-mailed him alerting him of a site malfunction, and he responded immediately to let me know he was in the process of contacting Mark.  Meanwhile, I contacted Roger @ MemoryDealers, whom I presume is one of the few who probably has Mark's phone number due to their physical proximity in Japan.

Mark showed up in IRC within minutes, and indicated that the trading engine had stopped on a checkpoint due to a very large order, needing manual intervention to continue processing.  He said this was to prevent a repeat of what we had in June.  It is a very good checkpoint to have if it's for real, and at worst is a clever misrepresentation (e.g. if the software crashed rather than there having been a checkpoint, the checkpoint becoming a convenient excuse).

Adam's initial response was that there was a large order and they needed to ensure it was legit.  Shortly thereafter, he told me that they had confirmed order was legit, and that they were resuming order execution.  By then the queue was backlogged.

Doesn't look like shenanigans to me, it seems like something that can be reasonably expected in the face of the unusual.

[bittenbob]

I am upset they removed my post which asked about this in a more polite manner and would like an explanation.

MtGox can't remove your posts on this forum, and I don't have any record of posts like that being deleted.

I had this graph posted in the MTGox AML announcement thread because someone asked what I meant when I said they owed us an explanation for the API problems yesterday. It disappeared one way or another which I found strange. The post asking what I meant was also gone (about 3 from thread). Not sure what happened with my post but it doesn't really matter since it doesn't change what happened with their API .

On another note sorry for posting in the wrong thread and thank you for locating it to the correct one.

[bittenbob]

I observed this myself on the charts.

Having seen Adam@MtGox at CES last week, I felt sure he would be responsive to me.  I personally e-mailed him alerting him of a site malfunction, and he responded immediately to let me know he was in the process of contacting Mark.  Meanwhile, I contacted Roger @ MemoryDealers, whom I presume is one of the few who probably has Mark's phone number due to their physical proximity in Japan.

Mark showed up in IRC within minutes, and indicated that the trading engine had stopped on a checkpoint due to a very large order, needing manual intervention to continue processing.  He said this was to prevent a repeat of what we had in June.  It is a very good checkpoint to have if it's for real, and at worst is a clever misrepresentation (e.g. if the software crashed rather than there having been a checkpoint, the checkpoint becoming a convenient excuse).

Adam's initial response was that there was a large order and they needed to ensure it was legit.  Shortly thereafter, he told me that they had confirmed order was legit, and that they were resuming order execution.  By then the queue was backlogged.

Doesn't look like shenanigans to me, it seems like something that can be reasonably expected in the face of the unusual.

Finally, an explanation. This is what I needed to hear but it should be coming from MTGox and not a third party such as yourself.

Shouldn't the API have just stopped feeding data instead of going into a continuous loop like it did (more than one site had this occur as well). Also my orders were in above 6 while all this was going on and i was able to move a sell from 6.44 to 6.88 so it was actually kind of a good thing for me. If this was a large order that froze up should my trades not have been executed on MTGox instead of showing pending. Also if I was able to cancel the one transaction and get another one in and the lower transaction never went through I don't know what to make of that.

Now if MTGox can come out and say this I will be satisfied.

[bittenbob]

I am a man who can admit he was wrong and I was wrong about deleting the post. It was my fault and was in another thread. Not sure why I thought it was in the AML thread. Sorry for the false accusations.

Still want an official statement from the Gox about the phantom activity though.

[hashman]

I am a man who can admit he was wrong and I was wrong about deleting the post. It was my fault and was in another thread. Not sure why I thought it was in the AML thread. Sorry for the false accusations.

Still want an official statement from the Gox about the phantom activity though.

+1

[FairUser]

I just want to throw this out there.  If you feel that you're being censored on this forum, please feel free to post on BitcoinPool's forum.  We are always interested when stuff like this happens, and we will make sure it doesn't get censored.  Keep in mind that MtG0x now hosts/controls this forum, so if something gets swept under the rug here you know why.

Good looking out bittenbob.

[antares]

I am starting this thread since my post in the MTgox thread was deleted on the matter. Yesterday when the trading queues were not acting as they were the API was going haywire showing phantom transactions on all charting sites. I don't know why they would delete my post showing the phantom transactions unless they were trying to sweep this under the rug. For the largest exchange this is simply not acceptable.

If anyone is wondering what I am talking about look at the post I am quoting below and you will see a very thick line between 6 and 7 at the bottom when all charting sites were looping between 6 and 7 for about 20 minutes. If you look back at the charts now it is a single thin line so these transactions did not occur.

If this post is in the wrong forum then I am sorry moderators but this affects the bitcoin community as a whole since they are (for the time being) the largest exchange. With behavior like this they won't be the biggest for very long.

dont be too upset on that one. This kind of behaviour is quite normal. I think mtgox has a bug in their trade order execution system, that comes into play with large movements on the market. Remember when the price went down below 5 for the first time last october? there was one sunday where it suddenly spiked up to 7 again, and I know many people that got sell orders at $12 filled during that action. however those trades were cancelled afterwards, and they also vanished out of the stat graphs. I guess that very same thing happened here, aka orders were cancelled due to being filled by a bug in the mtgox order execution. While this can suck big time if you lose money because of it, this is mtgox.

But however, unless mtgox comes forward, or there are some users on this forum that can confirm some of their trades have been cancelled after being executed, this is just some elaborate guess.

[kgo]

Orders were definitely crossed over.  I had buy orders at 5.50 and 5.05.  The 5.05 was partially filled, and the 5.50 was never filled.  Both are still sitting there open.

I am still waiting for an explanation from ZhouTong on that one.

So your problem was on Bitcoinia or directly on mtgox?

[finway]

I saw that too, strange. from 6.00 to 6.99 one by one (0.01).
I think MtGox should make some clarification.