Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

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I'm betting they are using this 48 hour window to upgrade their systems. The most important hint was this:

"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.

Funny, that this didn't happen when Bitcoin was climbing into the stratosphere, but when it was crashing.

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.

MtGox's new signup rate has grown significantly in the past month. It went from hundreds to thousands to over 20,000 new traders yesterday. A crash coincides with high volume (1 hour+ trading lag) -- a perfectly technical reason to fix the issues now regardless of the finances. At some point they need to get the new infrastructure in place (see: http://coinlab.com).

I just transferred all my BitCoins to https://btc-e.com - for whatever reason, you are only allowed to withdraw 100 Bitcoins/24 hours. Probably a fraud insurance element - MtGox will cover any fraud, and they are limiting their losses to 100 Bitcoins at a time.

You can withdraw up to 1000/day once your account gets verified, and up to 10k/day once it's "trusted".

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.)

I think the volume/unit time during the crash is generally higher than during the bubble phase. This can be seen in the steeper slope of price-time graph during declining phase compared to the rising phase of most bubbles. I guess fear is a quicker call to action than greed in financial markets.

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