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Comment by brokenmusic | Hacker News Reader

Yes, and now they're not paying BTC either. 50k BTC (over 4k withdrawal attempts) are now stuck in limbo. MtGox claims it's a purely technical issue due to their custom implementation of Bitcoin protocol. People don't really believe that anymore, most (at this point) on IRC and Bitcointalk and Reddit think Gox doesn't have the money. Some haven't received their BTC after 13 days of waiting.

MtGox hasn't released any official statement except this one: https://support.mtgox.com/entries/26128504-Update-Statement-...

No proof of having enough funds, no explanation.

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I could make some smarmy remark about how good FDIC insurance is looking about now but at those levels (north of 30M$ equivalent) even banks have a hard time. So I'll pass.

The reference page mentioned their "hot wallet" went dry (presumably it ran out of coin) and someone went to their offline storage and took out the USB stick with the offline wallet and will drive back into town and put some coinage into the account.

I suppose if you knew who the Mt Gox folks were, and you had enough BTC you could try to 'stage' this ala Oceans 11 or the Italian job but given the challenge of moving really large quantities of BTC into fiat currency I'm not sure that makes sense.

One of the things that is really fascinating about the BTC ecosystem is that all of this stuff happens visibly, unlike private banks where they just find the guy who embezzled the money shoot him and drop him off a pier or something.

The FDIC insurance funds only covers a small fraction of the liabilities of deposits.

If one of the too big to fail banks fails, and isn't bailed out, depositors are gonna get Goxed.

FDIC covers up to $200,000 for each account.

Approx 200 btc.

Note the issues the parent mentioned were with 4k+btc transfers

FDIC would not have saved them in USD

Pretty sure the GP talks about 4k transactions, not transactions with 4k+ btc.

The FDIC covers up to $250k for each account. It does so using a fund that's about $50b, for a depositor liability of around $5t. If you do the math, that means around 1% of depositor liabilities are covered. There are over 5000 institutions covered, however JP Morgan Chase holds around $1t in deposits (20%), BofA holds around $2t (40%) and then the rest is divided up in the long tail of decreasing market share.

This means that, if for instance BofA or JP Morgan Chase fails (that'd never happen, right?) that the liabilities alone of these banks are already 20x to 40x bigger than the entire FDIC fund.

Please tell me you see the problem there.

This means that, if for instance BofA or JP Morgan Chase fails (that'd never happen, right?) that the liabilities alone of these banks are already 20x to 40x bigger than the entire FDIC fund.

Note: If BofA or JP Morgan Chase went bankrupt, it wouldn't necessarily mean that they have zero assets. More likely they'd be able to pay 99 cents on the dollar and the FDIC would pay the last cent.

"More likely they'd be able to pay 99 cents on the dollar and the FDIC would pay the last cent."

How long would that take take and what about the overheads of winding up a bank? Also, what about the ranking of different kinds of creditors - depositors would only be kind of creditor if a bank was wound up?

The 2008 collapse saw initial bailouts of $500b.

A subsequent $700b was approved and executed, and later on over $7t where commmited (but not all used) for bailouts.

That easily puts the bailouts that banks needed in order not to go under at $2-3t. That's nearly 40-60% of depositor liabilities.

If the bailouts don't happen if JP or BofA go under (for whatever reason), then I don't think the 99c to the dollar theory holds up.

FDIC is backed by the full faith and credit of the US government. This makes the holdings of the fund itself irrelevant -- if BofA fails, Congress will make the depositors whole with Treasuries.

Thankfully, that assertion has never been fully tested. I'm not so optimistic.

I actually think that if the government collapses, the FDIC is the absolute last thing to fail. Every politician understands how much of a political suicide it would be to directly fail the voters so they lose something they own in a very personal way. (As opposed to the typical government malfeasance, where the losses come from large, impersonal pools.)

If government were to collapse, I expect the last thing that the politicians would be concerned with would be the FDIC. First thing in their minds would be how to spin this so they don't end up on the business end of a militia firing squad.

Exactly. The only reason to be afraid of that is if you have zero faith in the Dollar and thereby the Treasury/US government. And while I can somewhat empathize with the sentiment, if the US government collapses, we have bigger fish to fry here in the US.

Why would the FDIC need a $50b fund, if it's backed by "the full faith and credit" of the US?

They wouldn't need any funds at all. Whenever they needed money, they'd just ask the Fed.

So, what's the $50b for, really? Or maybe, "full faith and credit" doesn't really mean what you think it means, maybe it means: "full faith and credit... maybe, in the meantime use this $50b fund while we make up our mind"

It's set up as an insurance to which the banks pay premiums to cover the losses. The $50B fund exists to prevent the american public from having to step up every time, however, it is backstopped by full faith and credit.

So "full faith and credit" if congress republicans and democrats can agree, that's all fine then.

Actually, what the FDIC does is give the small depositor some confidence that his money will be there, even if the ban fails. This reassurance is enough to keep him from running to the bank when ever he is scared and pulling out all of his money and putting it under a mattress or something. At this, it is quite effective (even during the mortgage meltdown there were no large groups of withdrawals at banks by retail depositors).

>Please tell me you see the problem there.

No, you are being dramatic. Big banks don't fail when they have no assets. They just fail when they become insolvent. They will still likely have all of their deposits to meet the capital reserve requirements. It's when they get caught with illiquid assets that they fail. Look at the 2008 financial crisis and the banks that failed. There was nobody that got short changed that had a regular bank account.

Or leave him hanged with his pockets stuffed with money as an old-testament warning. What the supreme being in "Time Bandits" described as "doing something extroverted and vengeful."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Calvi#Death

Ack... now I'm torn over going and watching Time Bandits again or watching Bitcoin drama.

Where is everyone going, coinbase?

btc-e.com and Bitstamp, I guess.

Kraken.com

Is kraken taking money in all States? Or just South Carolina which, I believe, is the only State they have a license in.

There are regulatory limits on fiat transactions in some US states. The list of approved states has never been one state long, and the expensive and time consuming, US-specific process of acquiring state-by-state licenses for the remainder is well underway. Overseas, in more logically regulated places such as Europe and parts of East Asia, there's no such barrier.

kraken.com

Hopefully Vault of Satoshi's volume will pick up as a result. Top-notch infrastructure and things are communicated out to holders in a timely manner.

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