Bitcoin’s Value Falls 10% as Faltering Mt.Gox Exchange Continues to Implode | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin’s Value Falls 10% as Faltering Mt.Gox Exchange Continues to Implode

techcrunch.com

33 pointsJacobH53 comments

Please form two orderly lines. People who are shocked, appalled, and surprised form to the left. People who are just itching to say "I told you so!" please form to the right. I hear refreshments and snack cakes are to be served and a bar will begin selling liquor soon (cash only).

Third line: cold indifference.

It would be hard to convince them to line up.

While this may be painful, it will be better for Bitcoin in the long run to shrug off the dependence on Mt.Gox.

How can it be? do you really think the people that got screwed will continue buying and have faith in bitcoins? I wouldnt.

Agreed. How could Gox imploding result in a better bitcoin world? I'd lose a ton of money, so my little world would be directly worsened. The price of bitcoin is now about $500, but it likely would've stayed >$650. And now people will forever use this as an example of why bitcoin is dangerous: financial unregulation is dangerous.

It will be just another page in history, yes, but it's a painful one. Personally I still believe Gox will ultimately be okay since everything still has a logical explanation, but hypothetically it seems hard to believe that Gox self-destructing would be anything but bad news.

Scams happen even in supposedly highly regulated financial companies you only need to look as far as Bernie Madoff and Jon Corzie's MF Global this doesn't really have much to do with regulation.

I think the argument is that there's nothing to stop this from happening all the time and maybe even perpetrated by the same people. Yes, scams happen, but there are repercussions and sometimes preventative measures even work. The Mt. Gox soap opera is not something that would occur in a regulated baking environment (at least in the US environment), but in bitcoin it's been dragged out for months (since it became a target of the US Government). It's bad publicity if nothing else.

I believe in bitcoin and its long term potential, but there is no question that lack of regulated exchanges will stunt its long term acceptance.

"The Mt. Gox soap opera is not something that would occur in a regulated banking environment"

That just isn't true. Bernie Madoff got away with his outright ponzi scheme for nearly 10 years before being caught. Individuals expressed concern to the SEC about Madoff's investment fund as early as 1999. The SEC didn't do anything until 2009.

Isn't he in jail now? And also, which individuals? We are lucky enough to live in a society where "expressing concern" is not sufficient to put someone in jail.

Yes he is in jail, read the Wikipedia article for the details but basically people reported concerns to the SEC on 5 separate occasions beginning in 1999. The SEC ignored the complaints until Madof himself admitted to his sons in 2008 that it was a total ponzi and his own sons turned him in to the FBI. After he was arrested by the FBI in 2008 the SEC aka "the regulator" took action against him in 2009. Point is the regulator in charge didn't bother to investigate and didn't do anything.

In the end not much money was actually lost though. The huge losses you see in the headlines were mainly the fake gains. If you "invested" $1m with me for 10 years and I reported a 26% annual return you would have a $10m account on paper, but the gains never existed and as such were never stolen. People who withdrew their gains were sued and had to return the money.

The scam was told to be $65B, but the actual losses were ~$17B and they have recovered more than half that (over $9B). Additionally the IRS let the losses be written off, so you and I ended up picking up another half of that tab.

tl;dr it was an awfully large scam, but not nearly as large as most think. Less than half the value of an instant message client actually and only a few Instagrams.

What's you point? The amount of money lost doesn't really have anything to do with regulation. people filed lawsuits to get their money back.

Good regulation implies preventing fraud through rigorous rules and monitoring before it happens or if it does before it gets out of hand to the point of needing to resort to the courts.

It's not a question of whether scams happen - it's a question of how many scams happen and how severe they are.

Because as you imply in your other comment, MtGox is not deemed as trustworthy exhange by many. It is good that Bitcoin doesn't rely so much on it for now.

After all, MtGox is not Bitcoin.

This isn't the first time a Bitcoin company has imploded taking a large amount of customer funds with it. A lot of people have also seen this train wreck coming for a long time, like nearly 10 months ago it was obvious something wasn't quite right. Many people had already moved from Gox to more reputable exchanges like Bitstamp or Coinbase. This might effect Bitcoin in the near term while this shakes out but long term I doubt it will be more than a sentence in this history of Bitcoin's rise.

This is so harmful, because Mt Gox has been seen as the main exchange by many people, despite being almost useless for withdrawing USD for many months. People should have been avoiding it like the plague, but it was still a large percentage of the market.

One lesson here is that an exchange shouldn't be used as a wallet, i.e. Don't keep funds there for a significant length of time. Put your usd/btc in there, make your trades, then take the btc/usd out asap.

Coinbase has had it's share of hiccups and software fails as well. Are they still on MongoDB?

Is there something wrong with MongoDB that I don't know about? Is it not suitable for Coinbase's business?

Let's review...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5428382

So I don't have a horse in this race. I'm PostgreSQL-or-MariaDB kinda guy. Just trying to understand what's wrong wtih MongoDB. I agree I see a bunch of complaints in that HN thread, but I also see this:

http://www.mongodb.org/about/production-deployments/

There some heavy-weight companies on that list using MongoDB. eBay, SAP, stripe.

On the scale of things that concern me getting your $5 million US bank account seized by the US Government ranks above software reliability issues with Mongo DB.

The number of people who have not yet been "Goxed" dwarfs the number who are being screwed right now.

This isn't going to kill Bitcoin. MtGox has been seen as an extremely unreliable exchange since 2012, despite the healthy growth and relative stability of a few other competing exchanges.

It's no shock that Gox would die due to technical problems like this; they're not run by a technologically competent staff (compared to, say, Coinbase, a YC startup).

It will be a problem for a while, as the price drops, people get screwed, and people lose confidence in Bitcoin. However, it is probably best to not have the largest exchange be a disaster that has repeatedly shown its technical incompetence. For Bitcoin to move forward, Mt.Gox needs to go.

EDIT: in addition, hopefully people will learn from this, and not use exchanges as wallets, and not (try to) make trades on an exchange without doing their research first.

I believe "That which does not kill us makes us stronger" very much applies to Bitcoin. It will be painful for those people, but this is par for the course with Bitcoin and somehow it's still thriving (see: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=83794.0)

Bitcoin is a decentralized system that relies on many centralized services, but it also enables decentralized versions of many of those services to be built. As each centralized service gets picked off for one reason or another (Silk Road, Mt Gox) people will realize why the decentralized and trustless versions are necessary and migrate to those.

This is exactly what happened with file sharing (Napster, Gnutella, BitTorrent, etc), and we're starting to see it happening with money (Bitcoin), messaging (Bitmessage), DNS/naming (Namecoin), coin mixers (CoinJoin), exchanges (Ripple), etc.

Consider the people who haven't been screwed yet (in the future). If Gox manages to survive this and expand their customer base, it's wash, rhinse and repeat. Nobody wants that.

There is some speculation of insider trading, too.

http://i.imgur.com/qLYhzR3.jpg

Bitcoin wanted an unregulated currency, Bitcoin got an unregulated currency.

regulation is not a guarantee of much. major banks in foreign exchange are in the middle of a scandal involving widespread collusion on fixing of prices.

Bernie Madoff's customers wanted a regulated market. Bernie Madoff's customers got a regulated market.

CMO buyers wanted a regulated market. CMO buyers got a regulated market.

I could go on for a while. But I'm left wondering - do you really think that your comment is insightful or are you just reveling in schadenfreude?

Bernie's in jail.the system works. what's your point?

Oh, silly me! $18 billion missing from investor's wallets but he's in jail so no harm no foul.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Madoff#Size_of_loss_to_...

A ponzi scheme is what this system of greed demanded. The same will come to pass again.

As many have observed, it is not as if conventional currencies are free from this sort of problem either. But I do not draw an equivalence between the two types of crisis. What matters is that BitCoin faces the exact same question conventional currencies face when some sort of disaster strikes... what comes next? It should have been obvious to all, skeptic and advocate alike, that this sort of thing would happen in the "early days" of BitCoin. (Assuming of course that it survives long enough for this to be the "early days".) The question that determines whether it lives or dies is what emerges in reaction to solve this problem.

Don't chortle gleefully at the fact some disaster struck; it is a true and valid observation that conventional currencies still have disasters strike. Chortle if it proves that there's no practical solution to this sort of problem.

I have been and remain broadly skeptical. However, rationality forces me to concede that BitCoin has already gotten further than I would have predicted. The reaction to this crisis, moreso than the crisis itself, will be another interesting test of whether it has true staying power.

BTW... should BitCoin survive this, more disasters are absolutely sure to come. And when that happens, the question will be, what happens next?

I believe we're in the beginning of a weird transitory period right now, but in the long term cryptography and cryptocurrencies have the potential to replace the need for certain types of regulation entirely.

For example, it's possible to build a decentralized exchange between different cryptocurrencies (or assets where ownership tracked on a crypto ledger) where no party needs to trust any other party at all (e.x. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Atomic_cross-chain_trading)

Any chance the pdf file was up early and they simply guessed the URL? This announcement was named 20140220-Announcement.pdf (https://www.mtgox.com/img/pdf/20140220-Announcement.pdf) while the previous one was 20140217-Announcement.pdf (https://www.mtgox.com/img/pdf/20140217-Announcement.pdf).

Try it the next few days.

It's worth noting that Mt Gox's new offices as listed on their support website appear to be in a hotel. Hmmm.

https://www.google.com/maps/@35.656428,139.698518,3a,75y,117...

The 4th through 16th floors are office space. The hotels up top.

It's one of those virtual office services. The "new" address is also their original address which they used to use before they moved to their current, now former, location.

This "office" isn't "new". It is their old address before they moved, I sent a document there in 2011.

Does anyone know how much of the total BTC are still held within Mt Gox? If MG does indeed implode or go bankrupt, what happens to the BTC it still holds? I feel sorry for those who trusted MG with their BTC, but the writing was on the wall a while ago.

ELI5. How can a bitcoin on Mt.Gox be going for one price and the "general" bitcoing market be going for another? I feel like I'm missing something.

Non-Gox bitcoins have higher utility, in that they can be withdrawn.

Because the current price is just whatever a seller and buyer have 'agreed' to pay at any one time, if there are possible issues with bitcoins on one exchange (for instance, the real or imagined possibility that your bitcoins may go missing on MT Gox, or that there will be difficulties selling or retrieving the ones you hold in that exchange), people will be willing to pay less than the going rate for bitcoins on that exchange. Elsewhere, where this issue doesn't directly exist, people will still be willing to pay full price (though issues at MTGox may affect buyer confidence on other exchange, which leads to an overall decrease in Bitcoin price).

Default risk. The price for a bitcoin that is currently held by Mt.Gox factors in the market's expectation that said bitcoin will be able to be redeemed from Mt.Gox. Analogous to why your bank charges you a higher interest rate on a loan if you have a poor credit score, to compensate them for the perceived risk that you fail to repay the loan.

Gox is holding both the bitcoin and the dollars involved in the trades.

They have been doing a questionable job of transferring dollars out to customers for months and recently they stopped transferring bitcoin out to customers (supposedly due to some technical issues).

So basically MtGox isn't very connected to the general market.

Bravo, spot on headline. Wired, are you reading this, maybe take an example?

To the ground ! So here is MtGox owners exit strategy, vulgar theft.

Problem with mtgox is not that people think they are going to run with the money. Issue lies with the fact that they had some of bitcoins stolen with transaction malleability issue. Question is just how much got stolen. What market thinks with bitcoin price @mtgox is that they do not have enough bitcoins to cover all the people who want to withdraw them.

That's what they said, i choose not to believe them. If i'm ignorant you are just naive. Do you think these people are stupid? they know what they are doing you are just drinking the kool aid.

Your reply would have been better without the first sentence :(

Made the edit. Thanks for having a cooler head.

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