Mt. Gox is dead | Hacker News Reader

Mt. Gox is dead

coinde.sk

40 pointscaublestone15 comments

That's one hell of a misleading headline

Maybe this is why you don't pivot from a Magic: The Gathering site to a leading cryptographic currency exchange...

More importantly, given the repercussions (which will extend well beyond Mt.Gox itself) maybe this is why anything you'd like to use as a currency should be at least somewhat regulated by a stable and relatively trustworthy government.

Of course, that'll be a harder reality for the crypto-anarchist/libertarians to swallow.

Governments are made of people. Crypto-anarchist communities are made of people. I don't see any reason why one is inherently more or less capable or trustworthy than the other. Details matter more than ideology.

It isn't so much government vs. the crypto-anarchist community as much as it is government vs. corporations or individual actors operating within the crypto-anarchist community.

If a government is properly elected by the people to represent them and is transparent about their decisions and why they have made them, they are much more likely to do the right thing than a single corporation (which will be one to a handful of people calling the high-level shots, operating as secretly as they possibly can) in an unregulated fully laissez faire market. There is safety in the combination of number of decision makers and public access to the decision making process.

The biggest problem we face with this in modern America is that despite unprecedented access to instantaneous news sources, the government is becoming increasingly less transparent. This is in large part because of the insane lack of campaign financing rules, a frighteningly large portion of the decisions being made are coming directly from corporate America in the form of lobbyist bills that the corporations have written themselves, but also because of a culture of fear brought on by the whole "war on terror". Obama's call for vastly increased government transparency really resonated with me. Unfortunately this is one of a number of areas in which he was either completely full of shit or horribly ineffective in achieving his goals.

So I understand why people aren't super pro-government, because our current government has a lot of warts, but I really don't believe the answer is to go crypto-anarchist and put faith into small amounts of people making really big decisions at the top of private corporations which might actually have become "too big to fail" without causing massive collateral damage to people who have put their trust (and currency) into them.

People individually are too flawed to trust to make society-altering policy decisions in private, we just are. We need the safety in numbers and transparency that a good government structure brings us and we should be striving to fix that problem rather than replace it with what I believe would be a far worse one (corporation-backed anarchy).

That really doesn't have much if anything to do with it. The company changed hands since it's founding and there has been plenty of time to hire appropriate talent. The problem is incompetent management by it's current owner who was not the founder.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt.Gox

This headline is link-bait. Come on, Coindesk.

Somebody needs to build a plug-in that keeps track of which articles are linkbait. When a user clicks the link and arrives at the misleading article, he/she can downvote the page. Enough downvotes will flag the link as being untrustworthy, saving unsuspecting users from clicking through and generating revenue for the evil association of linkbaiters.

I know that someone recently created a similar extension - Downworthy - to combat the hyperbolic, asinine titles of articles that are designed to go viral, but I disabled it after having portions of useful, informative articles unintentionally disfigured.

If HN wants higher quality content all they have to do is be proactive about it. There's a flag button that works very well for removing bad journalism, bad link bait, and viral spam from the front page.

I'm no longer clicking any link formatted as "____ is dead."

Nietzsche: Click bait pioneer.

Title aside, I found the article itself to be a very interesting and in-depth analysis, so I'm glad I clicked.

Here's the comment from MtGox from around 24 hours ago:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1x91xq/mtgox_announ...

> Hello all. We just want to reiterate that this is not a “stop” but a temporary pause so that we can implement a proper fix to the problem. To analogize, not pausing withdrawals would be like trying to fix a car while going 120mph down the highway. The issue merely compounds on itself. This pause is clearly not ideal, but it will lead to a better outcome than doing otherwise. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience.

It would be great if that were true but Mt.Gox has a habit of saying things like this as if they will have the situation resolved shortly and then never following up. Case and point after the seizure of their bank account in the US early last year they put out a press release saying they would update everyone on the situation on such and such a date. They never said anything about it ever again. Now we are here. Hard to imagine how they can ignore this and survive as a business but their track record of follow though isn't great.

I expect they will pay up, but at the moment what MtGox does is a whole lot more interesting than anything they can say.

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