Mtgox stops trading for 12 hours
bitcointalk.org
bitcointalk.org
"Additionally trading fees will not be charged within 48 hours of trading resuming (until 2013-04-14 02:00am UTC)."
Seems like something they are offering to apologize for the inconvenience.
All told, between the 2 days of no trading, plus the 2 days of foregoing fee's, MtGox will forego over $250K of trading fees. That's a pretty big hit.
[Edit: Confirmed by MtGox themselves:]
-- snip --
Orders will not be accepted for the moment as we need to upgrade our database to accommodate the trading volume. However, you may still cancel your pending and open orders. Trading will resume at 11.00 am JST. Our apologies for the inconvenience caused and thank you for your patience while we work to resolve this issue.
]
[Edit #2 - I just realized, they are saying two, somewhat inconsistent messages.
Message 1: Trading is halted until 2013-04-12 02:00am UTC to allow the market to cooldown following the drop in price.
Message 2: Orders will not be accepted for the moment as we need to upgrade our database to accommodate the trading volume.
When your trading fees are a percentage of the value of the transaction, and you most likely have a large personal investment in Bitcoin, you have a -highly- vested interest in arresting a crash.
And yes, I know that MtGox is hardly the only place you can trade BitCoin, but it's definitely the largest.
At least in case of USD limits, it's about anti-money laundering. The government requires them to keep track of who's doing the withdrawals.
Aside from this, the limit was 400, but they lowered it to 200, and then to 100 when there were issues a year ago (a similar situation to today's - a crash, and people panicking, etc.)
Or are there other exchanges out there and MtGox just gets all the press because they keep breaking :)
"Cold Storage is the act of sending Bitcoins to an offline wallet address. Access to withdraw these funds must be by a human being and with a computer that is never plugged into the internet. This guarantees that a hacker cannot steal the wallet through the internet. This is done with transaction signing and USB keys to transfer the signed transaction from the offline computer to the online Bitcoin network. Over $500,000USD was stolen from the Exchanges Bitcoinica and Bitfloor by hackers because they did not use cold storage. VirtEx uses cold storage on approximately 80% of customer funds.
We keep the remaining 20% in a server ‘hot’ wallet to allow the small daily BTC withdrawal activity to be instant. If the amount of your withdrawal is too large, you will be required to wait for a human to perform a cold storage withdrawal of your funds. We have many different cold storage wallets and use multi-signature authentication so there is never just one person who can access cold storage and large amounts. You can even choose to place 100% of your funds in cold storage with us; however you will not be able to trade the funds unless you withdraw them from cold storage. This feature is coming soon."
Whatever their relative strengths or weaknesses, Gox has captured most of the market, and is high enough volume to make it the most liquid and trusted exchange, so it's going to be hard to challenge.
Here you have: mtgox, btce, bitstamp, bitcoin24, bitfloor.
Is it possible to buy bitcoins on, say Bitstamp @ $85 and then turn around and immediately sell them on Bitfloor @$94? Surely not? What keeps one from doing that? Or does that generally happen until the markets even out?
Note: I don't own any bitcoins (I am averse to risk), just curious and interested and know nothing about ForEx
Just as an example, bitstamp is trading at $75 while Mt. Gox is at $120 right now. So if I were to buy bitstamp coins, assuming no major market movements rapidly drove Gox down (which would also drive bitstamp down too) you could move BTC from stamp to Gox and pocket a profit of around $45 per coin by taking the risks involved.
Actually, Mt. Gox has no active market now so the last quoted prices there are irrelevant.
0. Get dollars to Bitstamp to buy bitcoins
1. Buy bitcouns from Bitstamp
2. Transfer bitcoins from bitstamp to bitfloor
3. sell bitcoins on bitfloor (assuming the price hasn't changed).
But MtGox gets something like 80% of all trades.
There's also bitcoinj: https://code.google.com/p/bitcoinj/
There are also many other informal exchanges, including in-person transactions and ebay.
As a business owner, there is nothing better than being able to transact with anyone, anywhere in the world instantly. You certainly can't do that with credit cards or paypal.
As a consumer I also actually like the chargeback and other protections afforded to me by paypal and credit cards.
--edit-- I'll add that technically I think it's a fantastic achievement, and as an amateur crypto-geek it's fascinating. The people who came up with the scheme and have coded it have done a great job (though there are the aforementioned scalability problems), but I disagree with almost all the design decisions that went into the vision of the thing.
The flip side is higher price charged by merchants due to higher processing fees. Not to mention that paypal will close down your accounts whenever they feel that you are too suspicious.
Of course, with bitcoin, merchants will charge lower fees since they no longer have to worry about chargebacks. Nobody also can't prevent you from spending bitcoin as you like(as long it's your personal wallet).
To me, "no longer have to worry about chargebacks" is the same thing as "can take your money and run, and there's nothing you can do about it".
How about being able to transact with 99% of your customer base in a reliable, fraud-proof manner?
Unless there's a chargeback 59 days later. These kinds of arguments can go either way.
Now with MtGox out of the picture, the real demand and supply are meeting.
A thinly traded market is at least a great place to try it.
Doesn't that describe the bitcoin market exactly to a T?
I mean, I really don't care what the volume or price is - if I'm buying coins to spend on SilkRoad that day. Which BTW, bootstraped Bitcoin from zero to 30 at least, and probably makes up 15-35% of the real demand (real value) for it to this day (with the other major fraction being gambling sites)!
Nor do any of the get-in-quick-on-this-new-thing speculators that buy after reading the latest bitcoin article.
And this all fits the fact that when the major EX closes, prices go down drastically on all the other smaller EXs. They should be going up instead for obvious reasons (with such hot demand)! But they go down! Explain that one to me please.
My intent was a little sardonic though.
The notion that SR is responsible for 2-3 cents of bitcoins run-up in the last 2 years ... something not right about that figure.
Market panic is something else entirely.
Because? Your evidence for conspiracy versus what we're observing is far less convincing.
See my further comment in this thread.
Also note that fraud (all forms of it), the criminal element, and everything bitcoin related is not exactly too far apart from each other on any given day.
https://mtgox.com/press_release_20130411.html
""" First of all we would like to reassure you but no we were not last night victim of a DDoS but instead victim of our own success! """"
A production quality open source exchange with focus on performance and security would be awesome.
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=199...
So now the question is, how long until an acceptable cryptocurrency comes along? And what does version 2.0 look like?
It will not look like a currency tied to an exchange run by amateurs.
They're not amateurs anymore.
They're just taking off.
Perhaps they're amateurs, but they are the best amateurs we've got.
Additionally, a shallow market is always a perfect pump-and-dump opportunity. Say you have a stock (or Bitcoin) that only has a volume of $100,000 a day. Then, if you're a small hedge fund and have about $20,000,000 devoted to small cap growth, or emerging market currencies, and your investment mandate allows you a temporary tactical deviation, you can buy the WHOLE supply of an asset for several WEEKS sending the price through the roof. When the crowd catches on and starts pumping money into your asset you exit the market and allow it to crash. Is it legal? No. Does it happen all the time? YES!