Mt. Gox Halts Bitcoin Withdrawals, Price Drop Follows
coindesk.com
coindesk.com
"I had a job interview with MtGox a couple of weeks ago for a frontend developer position. After talking about their technical environment I declined the position. Contemplated publicizing my story, but I have zero proof that the interview took place. But fuck me is their environment fucked up. Either way, I have been recommending to my friends to move any BTC away from Gox as soon as possible, and regret not bringing this advice into the open. I'm a Tokyoite, so if you want to talk to me about the job Interview, or just drink a beer, send me a DM."
"I was told that up until a few weeks [at time of the interview] ago, there was hardly any development environment to test changes. Most changes were done straight on the production environment. Typing this made me throw up in my mouth. The guy who interviewed me was very friendly, but I felt like a psychiatrist more than a job candidate. The dude went on about how shitty the atmosphere is at the offices, and what he told me about Mark seems to be spot on from what OP has said. Interview guy, if you read this, sorry yo."
I've talked to a backend developer at Coinbase, he said their codebase is a mess and that he wouldn't hold any in their system. Also I submitted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7169114 a couple of days ago based on what I found on Reddit. And this is Coinbase, the good guy. MtGox has always been a clusterfuck.
This feels like the internet used to feel like. Back when you just used to assume that a credit card transaction wouldn't go through. Why? "Because internet". Bitcoin is so young and immature.
This, and a few other things I've witnessed firsthand makes me wonder if Y-Combinator doesn't need better technical intelligence or some form of auditing. It could be done in a non-intrusive spirit of openness. Basically position it as a "show and tell" focused on technical process. Just have companies show what they're proud of, and if they so choose, show what they're ashamed of/what extent of technical debt they're in.
This is not a dig at Coinbase. I'm just suggesting that endorsing technical debt in the finance sector may not be smart.
Which is short-sighted, really. Technical debt has somewhat the same properties as financial debt, which is why public companies have to disclose monetary debt and have plans for dealing with it. It's high time that the culture caught up to technical reality and started to treat technical debt in the same way. This is especially true for finance!
In a way you are basically saying the same thing, but the warning sign to note is your observation that "the real world doesn't care." It would be insane for the real world to not care about a company's financials, particularly its debt. It's just as insane with technical debt.
When I say the "real world doesn't care", I don't necessarily mean that as a bad thing. The realities of shipping a product urge companies to make compromises. Like financial debt, technical debt is a useful tool, as long as it's used responsibly and kept under control.
And there's nothing wrong with technical debt in and of itself. Just like financial debt it's a tool of leverage and time-shifting costs. However, just like financial debt, it can bite you, so it's generally a good policy for companies to be open about what debts they have and their plans for dealing with it.
Relevant to the discussion, a level of debt for one company may not be appropriate for another kind of company, and this is especially true of financial companies.
There is no reason not to have a local wallet. There have been major coin thefts from online services, even very reputable services, sometimes sinking the entire thing. Cryptocoins are worth a lot of money and people will steal them from you if you leave them vulnerable. Cloud coin storage is always vulnerable.
I usually wouldn't jump in on hearsay or be negative in this way. But Coinbase apparently proudly uses MongoDB as their database. Which is just, like, bizarre.
But hey, I'm a rather satisfied customer. Although I'd be much more satisfied if they'd have let me buy earlier in 2013, instead of having an opaque systemwide cap system and not providing helpful responses.
But MongoDB? Man, we used that at 500px, and while it is fast for 99% of usage, I don't know if I'd trust it with financial data.
I feel like the "immaturity" argument is just an excuse. Bitcoin itself is young, but we know how to handle encryption materials safely, we know how to process online transactions, we know how to write exchanges, etc. Mt. Gox wasn't taking on any new problems here. Most of the new stuff that goes into Bitcoin is abstracted away by the Bitcoin protocol.
It'd be very nice for newer players with extensive experience in this area to step up. If not with a new service, then maybe fortifying an existing one (like Coinbase).
Would be willing to share my story, with proof, but sadly I'm not a good writer. :(
But I can confirm that it is as screwed up as the commentor on Reddit wrote. Not even the developers would trust their money or BTC to Gox.
I bet they're having even more legal difficulties though, as just running a regular share exchange requires a team of top notch lawyers to keep abreast of the huge volume of exchange laws. I doubt poor MtGox even has 1 full time qualified lawyer and they're dealing with entirely new legal ground.
The top sellers of mining hardware that I could find on Google (Butterfly Labs, Advanced Miners, Cointerra) all accept Bitcoin for payment.
Are you referring to some group upstream of the hardware sellers? I'm curious where you're getting this information from...
^ points out some nice parallels between the "Bitcoin rush" and the California gold rush. One of the points he makes is that it wasn't the miners, by and large, who ended up rich. It was the people who sold equipment and supplies to the miners. The namesake of Stanford University was one of them, interestingly.
There's plenty of new markets which failed to take off, and died after a few years of use. Confederate dollars aren't quite the useful currency they once were, as an obvious example.
Otherwise it cuts too close to survivorship bias: is there a popular asset where the market has "low liquidity and crappy technology"?
Yes, real estate.
There may eventually be a time where trading in bitcoins is productive, but for now it is a bit risky.
This comment really seems like poorly disguised crowing and nothing more. Not a reminder, certainly. Maybe a reminder of your great prognosticatory abilities -- you took the default position on 99% of new technologies, products and innovations. Where do you find the courage?
That boggles the mind. It is impossible for bitcoin to become fully illiquid as long as people believe it has value, because there is no infrastructure to approve transactions. The approval happens p2p.
Bitcoin and its ilk are going to repeat the issues the US had when small and regional banks all printed their own bills. Their info infrastructure were large books, updated monthly that provided info to determine exchange rates/values. People didn't like getting burned everywhere on transaction costs and their value going poof when unsavory characters ran the underlying banks into the ground or rumors about the stability of far off banks were spread.
Centralized. government-backed fiat currencies solve many issues that most Bitbugs are coming to grips with the hard way. It's those issues which are exposed publicly and quickly which will keep it the most amazing speculative financial invention to a group of fiercely, independently minded folks who have the skills and means to gloss over all the failings of such a device being a proxy for fiat currency. It's just another layer of abstraction, not a replacement. And it's a leaky abstraction.
I suspect regulation of various kinds will come to Bitcoin not through authoritarian government fiat (see what I did there?) but the way most regulation actually comes to pass: the public calls for greater regulation and transparency. It's possible that Bitcoin markets will accomplish this with minimal government intrusion, and I'm sure that's what they'll all aim for, given the underlying philosophy. I'm just not sure it'll happen.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/markets/4676369/Seven-hou...
MtGox never had their shit in order, exploded overnight because Bitcoin is awesome, and hopefully we are finally seeing their inevitable collapse so that someone with more competency can take over.
"The new technology platform has been developed using the Microsoft .NET Framework, with support from Microsoft and Accenture, and marks the final phase of the Exchange's four-year Technology Road Map project. "[1]
I was also told that there were Microsoft engineers on site doing training and review through the project. Either way, my point is that building a trading platform is extremely difficult even with top talent and enormous investment.
[1] http://www.onwindows.com/Articles/LSE-TradElect-system-goes-...
The sale was advertised as "units in stock, ready for immediate delivery"
When they came (something like a full month later) they were approximately double the spec of the devices I thought I had ordered, but still for the same price. Thanks, I guess?
I can't say if they're shipping any faster now, but if the trend of decreasing wait times has continued, I'd expect that by now, they'll be competition for Amazon's rumored new "ship before you order" practices.
Honestly for the new customers, if their ASIC parts were actually delivered in less than two weeks, I would have to say you're not getting the full BFL experience anymore, and you should probably ask for a refund.
I will probably not order from them again.
I particularly liked this juxtaposition on their store — http://i.imgur.com/uZVKRBX.png
Do you have it already now, are you completely sure of that?
Depending on your evaluations on those things, it'd make sense to sell none of the miners you manufacture, or all of them, or some of them to hedge your bets.
Also, short-term liquidity. You need to pay for manufacturing in hard currency, and you may want to hold on to your own BTC or have other reasons for not wanting to pay for manufacturing with USD converted from BTC.
The most popular reply was:
It is not guaranteed that purchasing mining equipment will generate in its lifetime more than it cost to purchase. That depends on the future of BTC price and the difficulty, both of which are hard to predict.
"Those who believe, for whatever reason, that it will indeed be profitable, will purchase devices. But most companies selling mining hardware are in the business of designing hardware, not of speculation and running datacenters - in terms of both risk profile and expertise. So long-term they should just sell the hardware."
and also
"In the gold rush the people who made the most safe/constant returns where not the miners but the people who sold them the shovels"
Also, BFL will benefit from the share of users that will not use their equipment to the max for whatever reason and they may not have the equity required to do the upfront hardware investment.
This question has been answered an immeasurable amount of times.
Several groups organized ASIC production projects. Avalon, BFL, and a couple others I can't remember. None of these initial groups had the capital to finance the NRE (Non-Recurring Engineering) for the ASIC, nor were traditional venture capital sources willing to do so. The ASIC production process has a relatively a high NRE, but low incremental cost. So, Bitcoin folk organized and participated in pre-sales to finance the NRE for these ventures. They had to sell the things or they would never have been able to afford to produce the initial units.
Additionally, even if some group would've had the capital to spin their own ASIC, it would have been a bad bargain for them to monopolize ASIC mining when competing against FPGA miners. Their capacity would have been limited to some fraction of the much smaller total network capacity in the FPGA era. Also, a single party swamping the network would've earned enmity from all of the other miners and Bitcoin users who could possibly have forced them out of the network, rendering their investment useless.
Anyone building a bunch of good mining rigs could certainly have a decent amount of bitcoins - but lots of people don't want to hold a large amount of a currency that is risky, volatile, possibly illegal, difficult to exchange for their local currency (that their taxes and rent need to be paid in), impossible to pay their vendors in, etc.
If you want gold, mine gold. If you want dollars, sell shovels.
In reality though, the ASIC companies are probably doing a mix of both - selling the hardware until they've reduced their exposure to BTC/USD to their desired levels, then keeping the remaining miners for "testing."
Also before you do business with any BTC company you should probably search Google and Pacer for pending lawsuits. BFL has had lawsuits pending against it in state and federal court alleging fraud since at least late Nov. 2013 but no one noticed until yesterday because they named BFL as "BF Labs" which is an uncommon way of referring to them. Some other mining equipment manufactures have federal lawsuits pending against them for fraud as well.
The fact they can't spin up a new MtGox environment with cloned data stores is troubling.
:|
Are you just as bitter that you missed Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, Priceline, Intuitive Surgical or CNR?
Point being, these opportunities are everywhere, always. You're surrounded by them right now, they're just not obvious. But neither was BitCoin. And with the above you're actually buying into a real company, rather than speculating on a price change.
But, to be fair I think your question is a bit pedantic. I think your parent is saying that with those companies, there is some way to impute value vis-a-vis products, management, history, etc. That calculus would then inform opinions on resulting price movements.
OTOH, when Bitcoin was at $1, forming an opinion on its price movement was almost pure speculation.
Exactly, or a company insider with options, preferably an early-stage employee. Being an accredited investor or early employee in a successful company dramatically lowers the pool of potential candidates to strike it rich.
You could still make a really nice return post-IPO, but it means you need a certain minimum amount of wealth you can risk investing to begin with (i.e. being able to access say, $100k or $1m and hope for a 10x return. This implies you are already upper-middle class or wealthier). I made up figures here so that the return would be life changing for most people. You could hope to turn $1000 into $10k but it wouldn't be that life changing for many people. Again, being able to access, say, $100k in liquid assets would dramatically lower the pool of candidates. Bitcoin was likely a one off like you say.
I disagree. No more than getting in as an early employee at Microsoft or Facebook or Google, or in on their IPOs, or even in early after the IPOs.
Apple returned 100x between 2002 and 2012. Tesla is up 300% the past 12 months. I've seen penny stocks go up 1000% in a day.
It's not like Bitcoin is perpetually turning out millionaires; the money has been made by the early adopters. It's not really any different than any other speculative venture.
Great point and one that is easy to lose sight of. I think bitcoin stings a little extra because many people on HN thought at the back of their mind that it might be big, but never acted. Whereas, at the time many of these stocks were cheap, most people weren't even considering buying them.
I don't think it's even that for a lot of people. What makes me feel stupid is that I considered buying a few coins just to play with, and if I had they'd be worth thousands.
2 years ago i turned over my bitcoins at 5x return in 3 months. there's no way i would have held on to them for a 5000x return.
In US-dollars, over time, I profited, but there were no US dollars involved in any of those transactions, except what BFL surely got from BitPay for my orders. I traded basically 22 Bitcoins for a decent shot at about 12 Bitcoins.
So it goes with the preorder game!
I almost think that it will... in other words a bitcoin-like bubble will happen again, but maybe just once, and then not again (because there are so many people like me who feel like they missed out the "first time" on bitcoin)
2. Number of users SPENDING bitcoins to purchase goods
3. Number of merchants accepting bitcoins for goods
4. Total $ value of bitcoins being spent to purchase goods
5. Total $ value of bitcoins being spent to perform international money transfers
6. Amount of press (bad press OK, good press is worth much more) that bitcoins are getting as it drives 1 and 3.
I'm sure others have their own list of fundamentals.
Blockchain doesn't have info for 1,2,3,4 or 5.
I sometimes estimate (3) and (6) by monitoring news stories. It doesn't give me absolute numbers, but some sense of scale. I sometimes see values reported for (2) or (4) from individual merchants, but they are rarely useful: the merchants report the great response they had in the weekend after first announcing their support for bitcoin, then we never hear numbers again. Occasionally we'll hear from sites like reddit about the total amount of contributions (not exactly goods, but close) being made in bitcoins: these are usually quite disappointing. I can think of no way to monitor (1) and (5) is likely kept secret on purpose.
So these are the fundamentals I care about and that I think affect the long-term value of bitcoin (as opposed to its short-term speculative value). But I don't have a way to measure them, except for guessing based on press coverage.
"mutually distrustful parties"
Localbitcoins ~50 pounds compared to two days ago.
Short term the price will drop even more dramatically, but once recovered, it should increase more, as main exchanges will get more busy. Or is there a flaw in my logic?
The purpose of the regulations are to protect consumers for companies that are either malicious or incompetent.
The problem is that the licensing process is expensive, painful, and long. There should be better ways. Nonetheless, there's a reason why the exist.
If you buy only one single (bitcoin|oz of gold) now, one day you could be rich beyond imagination!
The potential future price of (bicoin|gold) is over $100,000.
There are only xxx (bitcoin|oz of gold) produced per year so it must be scarce and valuable!
I'm in (bitcoin|gold) for the long haul! Buy and hold! Keep on stacking!
The price of (bitcoin|gold) is manipulated downward. Buy now while it's cheap.
The global economy is going to crash soon! Buy (bitcoin|gold) now or you will die when the crash happens!
Removing the limit involves buying coin from them, waiting 30 days, and solving some seemingly impossible credit report based identity quiz (some people report passing after 10 tries, you're limited to one try per 24 hours).
I've only been trading in small BTC amounts though so not sure if you'd hit liquidity problems if trying to trade large amounts (kraken's volume is quite a lot smaller than the bigger established players like bitstamp)
Bitstamp is also good, I hear, but I just went with finex because their fees are lower =P.
I think it is important to use an exchange outside the US though, because I expect the fed to start going Orwell on any bitcoin company soon.
There's also the Canadian https://www.vaultofsatoshi.com/, which seems to be top notch as far as the tech (multiple 2FA options, OpenPGP cryptography for email, etc.).
This is great for MtGox, all buy transactions pending just lost a $100 of the cost to fulfil. Surely then they wait for the bottom, initiate all transactions possible.
Price rises and they can take in more dollars per bitcoin sold, speculating, that may be all that enables them to actually deposit the amounts on the transactions they "fulfilled" in order to make the price bounce.
Crazy business.
It is sinking because of Russia.