Mt. Gox halts Bitcoin withdrawals until bug in bitcoin is fixed | Hacker News Reader

Mt. Gox halts Bitcoin withdrawals until bug in bitcoin is fixed

mtgox.com

31 pointsyetfeo7 comments

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So basically Mt. Gox:

1) Lost a few million $ to the US government

2) They lost their market leading position

3) They halted transactions, as people moved away

4) Friday reason: we need a stable transaction stream ''for debugging purposes''?!?

5) Monday reason: the ''exactly one DER-encoded ASN.1 octet representation'' of the underlying crypto is not hard enforced by the Bitcoin reference code

6) We keep your money until this issue is fixed

Well, that sounds very reasonable Sir!

If nothing else, I hope after all this the press stops basing the Bitcoin price on MtGox's price. Even services like Wolfram Alpha were using it, even though it's the only exchange that has Bitcoin price 10 percent more than everyone else, and it's not even that big of an exchange anymore.

Transaction malleability is a known design issue with Bitcoin. It is interesting to see that people are now trading "goxBTC" for "realBTC": https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=457723.0. One could imagine a conspiracy theory in which... ;-)

Also, it is technically possible for someone like Mt. Gox to publish a "proof" that they have enough BTC to cover everyone's deposits: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1xedpu/headlines_yo...

Damn, bought some bitcoins yesterday guessing the value would restore in seconds after a release from Mt.Gox. Probably going to buy some more now ;)

Can you explain that reasoning? Shouldn't the price plummet as soon as Mt.Gox coins are released?

Hmmm, sounds like they'll have to wait for enough people to update their software, or there'll be a bitcoin fork again.

starting to question seriously the solvency of mtgox. I have $1k tied up with them that I've been trying to withdraw for 3 months straight. First it was banking delays, now after cancelling my withdrawal to transfer via bitcoin, I have this.

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