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Comment by kmfrk | Hacker News Reader

I remember trying to buy some BTC on MtGox for fun, the last time the price crashed.

What an unspeakably horrible service. I thought I was in for hundreds of dollars over budget, but it turns out that not a single BTC was purchased at all.

I only intended to buy ~$50 worth, so I would only have earnt something like $200, but for the love of everything, stay the hell away from MtGox. It's insane how unprofessional they are.

healthcare.gov may be bad, but this is five circles of hell down from that.

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I find that many companies related to Bitcoin are extremely unprofessional and they still run their businesses like 3 years ago when Bitcoin was just an internet novelty and not a real currency the way it is today.

Just look at the latest Blockchain fiasco where the guy who runs the company got butthurt over some Reddit comments and got involved in a flame war. MtGox's lack of professionalism is just the tip of the iceberg.

I love BTC and I wish it would take off in a major way, but in order for that to happen people with shitty attitude need to stop running the community. I guess this is why regulation exists in the real world... oh well...

Definitely, which is why I tried to just buy a few (fractions of) bitcoins just for the historical fun of it, but as intensely skeptical I am of all the bitcoin craze, I was still shocked at just how awful MtGox is. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if I could code something better.

Just to tell people that as amateurish as they may think these exchanges are, it's actually much worse.

Makes you wonder how a company like CoinBase even got funded by YC, come to think of it.

Probably because CoinBase is bringing some professionalism to the game. I admit I had some bad experiences with CoinBase in the beginning, as they were getting scaled up, but they always handled it with professionalism.

This is part of the scary naivete of Bitcoin boosters. It's as if how to set up and run computers for serious financial systems was never worked out by anyone before. There has to be a Bitcoin exchange that isn't run by clowns ... hasn't there?

Read some of the CoinBase founders exchanges here and elsewhere, and you'll see that they bring some very good customer service to the Bitcoin world (although they really struggled with scaling up earlier this year).

Bitstamp also runs a highly-professional outfit, with customer service usually responding to my queries within a day, often sooner.

I've had good experiences with CampBX. However' I've never met the people who run it, so I can't comment on their clownishness.

The problem is all the companies trying to be legit are being choked into irrelevance by stifling regulation (with a few exceptions like Coinbase). I expect that next year after a few make it all the way through their compliance efforts (e.g. kraken.com, coinsetter), the situation will be much improved.

> It's as if how to set up and run computers for serious financial systems was never worked out by anyone before.

I've started trying to help the Bitcoin ecosystem in that area.

Until recently there wasn't enough money in Bitcoin to cover the cost of security. Obviously that is changing quickly, but it will take time for serious people to enter the market.

Was there enough to cover basic competence?

"No database backups ... Everyone had root" https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=81045.msg921159#msg9...

Unsalted MD5 password hashes: http://www.dailytech.com/Inside+the+MegaHack+of+Bitcoin+the+...

Wallet on AWS instance, no local backup: http://siliconangle.com/blog/2011/08/01/third-largest-bitcoi...

This shit's just inept.

MtGox was handling 90% of exchange last year, but now - only 25-30%. Bitstamp is huge now, and Bitcoin-Central.net is easy to use (although it hasn't regained it's past volume yet).

Bitstamp looks interesting, but Bitcoin-Central is down, ironically.

From my own experience, Bitstamp is ridiculously easy to use.

Just signed up with Bitstamp to try it out, but why don't they accept VISA deposits?

Bitcoin is not reversible after 10 minutes, credit card transaction is not reversible after 90 days in some cases. Guess how much fraud will happen to anyone selling Bitcoin with PayPal, Visa or similarly reversible payment mechanism.

The pain in the ass with buying Bitcoins is due to a simple thing: you never own government currency, you always ask someone else for permission to use it and it's always based on human decision. Gold and Bitcoin you can own. Paper bills you can own to some degree (they print more of them every minute, thus taxing your savings all the time). Digital virtual currency USD or EUR in your virtual bank account - you don't own. Banks can even reverse SWIFT/SEPA transfers if they want.

Thanks for the explanation. Food for thought in the second paragraph there...

I'm intrigued - how is BTC reversible within 10 mins?

I think oleganza is referring to the fact a new block should be generated roughly every 10 minutes, and until the transaction has been confirmed you can attempt a double-spend.

Not much. Zero-confirmation transactions are quite hard to revert, so they are widely accepted for small instant purchases.

Here's how you normally do it: send a transaction with fairly recent inputs with a zero mining fee. If you are lucky, it will propagate slowly and will reach the merchant sooner than 50% of the network nodes see it. When the merchant sees your transaction, he ships you the product, then you immediately send out double-spending transaction with standard mining fees (sent to your own address). It will propagate much faster and probably will end up mined before the first one.

Fraud with zero-confirmed transactions is most likely in some fully-automated schemes like lotteries, where repeated attempts to reverse the payment pay off immediately.

10 minutes is a rough guideline on how long it takes the network to confirm a payment, and verify that a transaction is not a double-spend or otherwise invalid. For large payments you'd want to wait longer because a theoretical attacker would have more incentive and resources to construct a double-spend.

I'm not very confident about a upstart financial services company based in Slovenia.

Not a single mention of financial guarantees, insurance or regulation on their site.

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