New message from Mt. Gox | Hacker News Reader

New message from Mt. Gox

mtgox.com

156 pointsmxx176 comments

I'm one of those who lost a good amount on MtGox. It wasn't in there because I thought they are a bank, I put it there because I like to speculate from time to time. As such I was prepared to lose most if not all of it anyway. I didn't expect things to go wrong so thoroughly, but still that was the premise of my deposits there.

So from that perspective, I'm not really mad about them losing the money. It's unfortunate, it even really sucks, but shit happens. Sometimes that shit is an apocalyptic event.

What makes me angry though is their utter failure to communicate, to admit what happened. I feel like they're taunting their ex customers, or at the very least they don't give a crap about anything at all. That's what's really off-putting, and that's what breeds speculation about them being the ones who perpetrated the theft in the first place (which I personally don't believe). Instead what we see here is an absolute non-message from them.

It's like this Seinfeld episode with the shirt at the dry cleaners. We know they shrunk it, they know they shrunk it, so they should just come right out and admit "we shrunk it"!

I guess I am naive but I always thought Japan would actually have stricter regulations and penalties for businesses that do this kind of thing, relative to the US.

They might .. but enforcement is hardly automatic and tends to be slow. They might already be investigating.

Exactly. The US has a pretty good, as these things go, food protection regime. But it hardly mattered when Peanut Corporation of America (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanut_Corporation_of_America) set up a factory in Texas and never informed any of the authorities so it could be regulated. (That wasn't the only facility that was rotten, but the one the regulators never had a chance to fail in dealing with.)

> or at the very least they don't give a crap about anything at all

They were the market leader, with substantial revenue and lots of cash flow.

Why they didn't prioritize hiring some people and securing their platform is still beyond my understanding. It's up there with the $100+ billion in cash Apple is evidently not using to hire enough code reviewers or implement adequate security processes for their most important and sensitive code that supports their entire (massively profitable) business.

I really wonder where people's priorities are. They're not total morons; it must be an interesting reason why these circumstances happen. It's not hard to solve these problems with money - so there has to be a neat (if utterly dysfunctional) story behind it.

Seriously, guys. Spend $20 on a flu shot for your golden goose.

I couldn't agree with this more. It's human nature not to prepare for a theoretical risk. But once it's happened to you, and to many others in the same industry, it's just foolishness not to invest in prevention.

I imagine there's also a bit of outsider-preference going on here. There's no lack of people who could have been hired to implement controls and audits that would have easily caught a slow leak of coins, but they're part of the Obsolete Fiat Economy and thus irrelevant. "Dunning-Krugerrands", indeed.

I don't think your (or their) equating "competent programmers and businesspeople with common sense" with "obsolete fiat economy" is what happened - it's not really a meaningful logical jump. There's got to be something else.

> It's human nature not to prepare for a theoretical risk

That's a substantial generalisation. Some people, especially in software engineering, spend a great deal of their day thinking how best to prepare for theoretical risk.

Yes, it is a substantial generalization, or perhaps a sentence not carefully crafted to withstand nitpicking.

In my job I do the very thing you describe. That said, I'm spending a lot more of my day preparing for the more likely risks, rather than the ones I can just dream up. I doubt many people here are posting from their bomb shelters full of emergency food and water rations, antibiotics, radiation treatments, either.

My point is that I could forgive the first lapse. Fool me once, and so on. But Mt. Gox had their precarious position quite expensively demonstrated to them. A competent management team would have made security and fraud management their top priority nearly 3 years ago when they were last caught with their pants down. It's hard to see them as victims in this because they were so negligent in their responsibilities to their customers.

> Apple is evidently not using to hire enough code reviewers

It's naive to think that the more people you throw at the problem, the less bugs there will be.

See also: The Mythical Man-Month.

Catching bugs via parallel support staff not in the primary workflow, or even building automated infrastructure is exactly the kind of parallelism that Brooks diagrams out as within the realm of workable in his team structure diagrams in TMMM.

The intel agencies (both the ones where Apple lives, and all the other ones too) are black box testing this stuff, every single point release, automatically - you can be sure. Why Apple isn't is confusing. They wouldn't even have to be on the team or in the building with the development efforts themselves.

There's something we're missing here.

If you are saying "merely hiring more people to review the code won't work," then I agree. [1]

If you are saying "hiring more highly-skilled people to review the code won't work," then I'll disagree. App sec engineers can be had for the price.

[1] I say this despite the fact that this was a bug that leapt out at people who had no security knowledge. The one before this and the one after this won't be like that.

Proper code reviews help.

Oh, and unit tests.

How do we know they didn't just steal it all themselves?

You don't, but that doesn't make it true if you remove your question mark.

I think the problem is that many people are reactive when it comes to risk. Most people tend to be risk averse, which is counterintuitive to the empirical observation that they don't prepare well for so-called "black swan" events. I suspect it's a case of moral hazard, which makes perfect sense. It's a lot easier to gamble someone else's money.

NO, in the Apple case its not hiring enough code reviewers..its even worse not using the coding talent they have to code a simple code scanner that detects brazen shit like a goto statement...

Apple's mes sup is pure management goof based on culture same as MTGX

> It's not hard to solve these problems with money

Have you ever read The Mythical Man-Month? These things are very hard to solve, no matter how many resources you throw at the problem. Sometimes, it's just a choice between quick iteration / innovation and bad bugs vs slow-release and less bugs. Since reliability is fairly difficult to assess above certain levels, people will pay for the new shiny, not for less bugs.

>> or at the very least they don't give a crap about anything at all ...

> They were the market leader, with substantial revenue and lots of cash flow.

Yes, but there are any number of examples where being the market leader breeds indifference and irresponsibility -- example Microsoft.

> Why they didn't prioritize hiring some people and securing their platform is still beyond my understanding.

It's likely they grew from a tiny operation to a very large one without anyone fully grasping the meaning of the change and adjusting to the new reality and taking the precautions that their new status demanded.

How much did you lose on it?

Enough to feel uncomfortable telling people the amount ;)

Bro-hug. :) Seriously.

It's not even as simple as a failure to communicate.

It's hard not to conclude that they outright lied. First it was malleability, then it was "we're waiting on bitcoin developers," then it was "we've moved due to protesters and security problems," and now it's "we've closed our site due to recent news reports."

I wonder when precisely they realized that >700,000btc were missing.

If I'm not mistaken, mtgox has not publicly stated that >700k BTC are indeed missing.

I think it's extremely unlikely the total missing coins is anywhere near that number. Extremely.

>I wonder when precisely they realized that >700,000btc were missing.

Once they stole the 700,001st bitcoin?

I have a speculation: This has been an ongoing issue for some time now. Kerpeles was hoping to solve the problem before it became known widely, and if lucky be able to continue operation as a fractional reserve (unbeknownst to MtGox clients). We could be really charitable to him and assume that he intended to eventually repay the missing BTC from the proceeds of MtGox. At some point, that became an impossibility, but Kerpeles clung to the belief that he could rectify the situation. Kerpeles didn't communicate succinctly with people outside his organization because that would risk alerting outsiders to the extent of the problem and cause a "run on the bank".

>I wonder when precisely they realized that >700,000btc were missing.

Stating the obvious, but it didn't occur all at once. If my speculation bears any resemblance to reality, it would be interesting to know when MtGox' solvency tipped past any chance of recovery, and how long Kerpeles has known that to be the case. I'm thinking that a year or more may have passed.

If they're under investigation by a regulator or a criminal prosector they may be severely legally restricted as to what they can say publicly.

OK...

...

... I shrunk it.

There was a comment on some forum about a guy who interviewed with them for a job & learnt that they don't have a testing environment. They just push changes to the production code & see how it goes. In my opinion, they were asking for it.

Edit : Here's the link : http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1x9gue/my_protest_a...

CONSPIRACY THEORY TIME.

What if Mt. Gox didn't really lose a post-Panamax boatload of Bitcoin (just a small amount)? They're just manufacturing a panic so they can buy Bitcoins at fire-sale prices, declare "We have all the BitCoin we need after all, we fixed our bug, everything's fiiiine" and maybe even turn a cash profit on the upside?

</conspiracy theory, assumes a modicum of competence, etc>

If there was any evidence of that they'd go to jail for a long time - even if bitcoin is not directly regulated, I'm sure there are still some anti-fraud regulations that would kick in...

Which statement do you think is fraudulent?

They could actually have lost the bitcoins. They could be still having technical problems.

Fennecfoxen's theory could be illegal market manipulation, but I wouldn't be surprised if the BTC market is weird enough that it doesn't fit under the laws against that. Or at least that it'd be such a mess to prosecute that prosecutors would all find something better for their careers to do.

Fennecfoxen's theory could be illegal market manipulation

Market manipulation in general isn't illegal, so it would basically boil down to if the SEC considered BTC a currency or not.

> I'm sure there are still some anti-fraud regulations that would kick in...

I don't know, but I don't think so. For the law you may be trading in monopoly money at your risk.

Intentional misrepresentation of fact for material gain doesn't seem to require currency of any sort.

So Kome I'll make you a deal, I've got a ownership title for the Brooklyn Bridge and I'll trade this title to you for a case of beer... deal? Deal. Sucka. Then it goes to court. Assuming you can convince the court I knew the title was fake, and the case of beer is worth more than the fake title (maybe the title has artistic merit, or maybe the beer was worthless American Lite "beer" of negative worth) then its pretty cut and dried as fraud.

What's the fake in this case? They would be convincing people that bitcoins are worth less due to their actions (and it is worth less during this period, as people have lost much faith), buying at the reduced priced, and then covering their losses and supposedly restoring at least some faith in the market, once again raising prices. Where's the fake title? Where's the lie?

What about the people who exploited transaction malleability to defraud MtGox? Will someone go after them? Doesn't MtGox have their details?

If not fraud, then simple theft.

Yeah, regulated or not, that would almost certainly qualify as wire fraud, at the very least.

Does "wire fraud" even exist anywhere else in the world besides the good old USofA?

In most of the world it may be just plain fraud; the "wire" distinction is a justification for invoking the interstate commerce clause and, thus, federal jurisdiction in the US.

But its still probably illegal just about everywhere.

I sure hope there's no such law. Let those who panicked and sold cry, because they were speculators to begin with.

Should there be the same laws kick in if they drive the price up, by say, adding fake orders on their exchange? I don't even think that should be illegal.

The market should move as it moves, through whichever means: fairness, deceit or ruse. I wouldn't want BTC any other way.

> Should there be the same laws kick in if they drive the price up, by say, adding fake orders on their exchange? I don't even think that should be illegal.

I strongly agree, and I do believe that there's price manipulation going on with the Gox situation at the moment. Is it just an attempt by Gox to make some money back? Or is it something far bigger aimed at damaging the reputation of BTC? Don't forget that Karpeles has recently been vulnerable to manipulation from the USG [1].

But It's surprising that you wouldn't want BTC, when on the road ahead lies Open Transactions, distributed exchanges, and so much more innovation that will take your above statement and put it directly into code. Thus making these wall-street tactics obsolete.

[1] http://thegenesisblock.com/warrant-for-mt-gox-wells-fargo-ac...

For now a bitcoin is just like a soda can to the eyes of the regulators.

So here is a fun exercise, think of bitcoins as soda cans and rethink the whole situation.

It doesn't have to be MtGox, but anyone who wants to see a quick collapse in the price. And given the anonymous nature of the internet, it is super easy to do.

I don't think it's the anonymous nature of the internet that makes this easy. After all, the internet is far less anonymous than many think.

It's likely the unregulated nature of Bitcoin that makes this easy to do. After all, who is going to chase down market manipulators with search warrants and wiretaps?

Yeah, speaking of conspiracy theories, why is no one kicking around the possibility of sabotage from established banks? and/or governments?

They also mentioned buying back at low prices in one of those leaked documents.

What I don't understand is why people would continue selling at any reasonable volumes at firesale prices when other exchanges are doing "fine" (Bitstamp down ~25% vs 2 months ago). Unless I misunderstand it, the malleability bug won't prevent sending btc to other wallets. Is mtgox going to block their users from sending btc and only allow them to sell internally? That would be pretty much equivalent to seizing all their users' coins. Is it just the combination of lots people who own small enough amounts of btc not to care going "fuck it, I just want out"? People not trusting other exchanges after this, or betting that other exchanges will crash too before they can get accounts verified at them and sell their coins?

Presumably when Mt Gox's bank accounts get seized, whatever money in them will be used to pay off accounts with real currency balances.

The people holding bitcoins will get nothing.

That brings up a point of confusion for me. As understand the news, Mt Gox didn't lose a single dollar. They lost 700K BTC. It is neither being pedantic, nor beside the point that this is not the same as $400M. It is the point.

That's not entirely true, about $5 million was seized by and is currently being held by the US government and another $5 million is being held hostage by CoinLab a US company that once had a deal with Gox to handle US customers but things went south along the way and they are not being sued by them instead. So about $10 million is tied up in less than ideal situations.

If the leaked crisis plan memo is correct, then they had ~$50 million in dollars on account with them, and total cash assets around $22 million.

So, even ignoring the Bitcoin, they lost quite a lot of dollars.

> Presumably when Mt Gox's bank accounts get seized, whatever money in them will be used to pay off accounts with real currency balances.

Weren't a number of Mt. Gox's bank accounts already seized for other reasons? Before the loss of bitcoins issue, wasn't this already a source of concerns about Gox's viability?

That's exactly what happened. No coins were allowed to be withdrawn from MtGox. That's why people panicked and sold at firesale.

Ah ok, thanks for clarifying. I had assumed the freeze starting a few days ago applied to trades as well but clearly not.

Actually, broader reason was that people concluded that MtGox have lost all the coins. And will be insolvent. In that event, it be easier to sue them for cash instead of coins.

>What I don't understand is why people would continue selling at any reasonable volumes at firesale prices when other exchanges are doing "fine" (Bitstamp down ~25% vs 2 months ago). //

That's only relevant if you can move your bitcoins to a different exchange. If your bitcoins are held with MTGOX and you're able to run a transaction that extracts any value then that's better than the potential case in which MTGOX simply declare all bitcoins have gone and close all accounts.

I posted this idea a few weeks ago (IIRC) - basically if MTGOX could crash the price then they could buy the bitcoins at a lower price; make an announcement that they're now fine, rebound the price and then afford to cover losses and possibly make a profit too.

It strikes me that's not moral, though some may consider it so, but it's probably not illegal to manipulate "toy" currencies. In the financial sector it seems it's only really considered wrong to fix real ones if you get caught.

I think you do misunderstand it -- no one has been able to transfer bitcoin out of MtGox for weeks now.

Or they're fucking up comms as best they can deliberately in order to drive the price down, so they can buy enough btc to "repay" everyone.

THIS. The whole lack of communication, the dead quiet, no explanations attitude. It's so easy to just admit what happened but they're deliberately keeping people in the dark. Giving out only enough information like "we're monitoring the situation and will react accordingly" to let people know they're working on something and prevent themselves from being sued (for now). I don't blame them for doing what they're doing at this point. They're trying to be realistic in their approach to fix it as best as they can. Driving down the price to 100-300, buying up coins and waiting till the whole market goes back up to 800 and selling them to pay off the losses is really all they've got.

This reminds me of corporate announcements that say "for your convenience" just before saying something incredibly inconvenient.

"For your convenience, all your Bitcoins have been deleted."

Here in Argentina the government does this all the time. For example, Today they have announced that Nic.ar, the entity that handles .com.ar domains, will start to charge 200 $AR to register a domain. And the guy that made the announcement said "The users were asking for this from long time" (yes, of course, users are asking to pay for something that is free). Source http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&pre...

If it's free, how do you discourage people from registrering a domain just for speculation? Paying for it is a good way.

The current message means absolutely nothing:

"Dear MtGox Customers,

In the event of recent news reports and the potential repercussions on MtGox's operations and the market, a decision was taken to close all transactions for the time being in order to protect the site and our users. We will be closely monitoring the situation and will react accordingly.

Best regards, MtGox Team"

Sounds very passive. "Closely monitoring"? "React accordingly"? As if they were not the ones running the site.

Don't forget "a decision was taken"...

Words chosen very carefully in an attempt to keep everyone calm..

Words chosen very carefully that potentially hold a subtext. Are they hinting at a security service takedown and gag? MtGox would be a potential target if, say, someone wanted all the data to do a statistical analysis and tie MtGox accounts to SR accounts.

Way out there, but it's anyone's guess right now, and I thought I'd throw this hat in the ring.

"React Accordingly" can still mean freak the 'f' out.

It actually made me laugh out loud. The statement makes it seem like MtGox was all fine and dandy until media started to talk about its shutdown. And now they say:

> We will be closely monitoring the situation and will react accordingly.

As if they're just sitting back, staring at their screen, waiting to see what will happen. Passively.

The poor grammar in the first sentence suggests someone for whom English is a second language.

That passive voice is maddening!

Interesting that they changed the language to "in light of" correct the grammar.

I wish there system was as strongly encrypted as this message.

I think they might be manipulating the market. Here's my translation:

"Because people discovered that we lost or stole money, and that would destroy our operations, someone who doesn't want to be responsible for making a decision decided that we could try causing a market crash by dramatically wiping our accounts, lowering the price enough that we could buy our way back to solvency. It didn't entirely work, so we're making this announcement, which is also meant to lower the price, or if that doesn't work, allow us to segue back into operations. We will be monitoring the Bitcoin price and will react accordingly."

What are they doing in the page source there? Storing a message in a cookie then refreshing the page to display it?

The second time you visit the page, you'll get your cookie-stored statement.

Almost seems like they want to be able to change their statement without previous visitors seeing the changes.

I don't see anything like that. Here's the page source for me:

<html> <head> <title>MtGox.com</title> </head> <body> <img src="/img/mtgox_logo_mail.png"/> Dear MtGox Customers, In the event of recent news reports and the potential repercussions on MtGox's operations and the market, a decision was taken to close all transactions for the time being in order to protect the site and our users. We will be closely monitoring the situation and will react accordingly. Best regards, MtGox Team </body> </html>

Wait, I refreshed the page a few times, and once, I got:

  <html>
	<head>
		<title>MtGox.com</title>

  <script type="text/javascript">
    var AKSB=AKSB||{};AKSB.q=[];AKSB.mark=function(b,a){AKSB.q.push(["mark",b,a||(new Date).getTime()])};AKSB.measure=function(b,a,c){AKSB.q.push(["measure",b,a,c||(new Date).getTime()])};AKSB.done=function(b){AKSB.q.push(["done",b])};AKSB.mark("firstbyte",(new Date).getTime());
    AKSB.prof={custid:"223233",ustr:"",originlat:0,clientrtt:19,ghostip:"23.51.248.44",ipv6:false,pct:10,xhrtest:false,clientip:"130.223.174.194"};
    (function(b){var a=document.createElement("iframe");a.src="javascript:false";(a.frameElement||a).style.cssText="width: 0; height: 0; border: 0; display: none";var c=document.getElementsByTagName("script"),c=c[c.length-1];c.parentNode.insertBefore(a,c);a=a.contentWindow.document;a.open().write("<body onload=\"var js = document.createElement('script');js.id = 'aksb-ifr';js.src = '"+b+"';document.body.appendChild(js);\">");a.close()})(("https:"===document.location.protocol?"https:":"http:")+"//aksb-a.akamaihd.net/146060/aksb-a/aksb.min.js");
    </script>
    </head>
	<body>
		<p><img src="/img/mtgox_logo_mail.png"/></p>
		<p>Dear MtGox Customers,</p>
		<p>In light of recent news reports and the potential repercussions on MtGox&#39;s operations and the market, a decision was taken to close all transactions for the time being in order to protect the site and our users. We will be closely monitoring the situation and will react accordingly.</p>
	<p>Best regards,<br/>
	MtGox Team</p>
	</body>
  </html>

This is very odd behaviour.

Someone already mentioned in a previous thread that this is an anti-dos method.

AKSB = Akamai

http://aksb-a.akamaihd.net/146060/aksb-a/aksb.min.js

This is what I see:

  <html><head><title>MtGox.com loading</title></head><body><p>Please wait...</p><script>function xdec(data){var o="SOME_RANDOM_BASE_64_THAT_KEEPS_CHANGING";var o1,o2,o3,h1,h2,h3,h4,bits,i=0,ac=0,dec="",tmp_arr=[];if(!data){return data}data+='';do{h1=o.indexOf(data.charAt(i++));h2=o.indexOf(data.charAt(i++));h3=o.indexOf(data.charAt(i++));h4=o.indexOf(data.charAt(i++));bits=h1<<18|h2<<12|h3<<6|h4;o1=bits>>16&0xff;o2=bits>>8&0xff;o3=bits&0xff;if(h3==64){tmp_arr[ac++]=String.fromCharCode(o1)}else if(h4==64){tmp_arr[ac++]=String.fromCharCode(o1,o2)}else{tmp_arr[ac++]=String.fromCharCode(o1,o2,o3)}}while(i<data.length);dec=tmp_arr.join('');return dec};document.cookie=xdec('MORE_RANDOM_BASE_64_THAT_KEEPS_CHANGING').replace(String.fromCharCode(0),'').split('').reverse().join(''); location.href='/';</script></body></html>

Please add two spaces before your gigantic layout-breaking text.

That's the result DOM source. Try doing a lynx or curl on the site. The entire statement is served through filling a cookie with JavaScript and reloading the site.

Or so it was when I posted my earlier comment.

You're right. Firefox's "View Source" button doesn't do what I thought it did. Curl gives a page with a "Please wait" message and a pile of Javascript.

I learned something today.

I don't see that either, here's the code I'm seeing: https://gist.github.com/christianbundy/9213200

The script is for a DDoS protection service (http://www.prolexic.com/). It only shows up the first time you load the page.

I would not like to be in the shoes of mtgox CEO... He lost about 400M USD, some of them probably belonging to shady peoples (drug dealer, mobs, etc.)

That's the first thing I've thought. Back in the old SR days you could hire hitmen for pretty reasonable amounts, especially compared to 750kBTC.

Back in the old SR days you could hire FBI agents posing as hitmen for pretty reasonable amounts, especially compared to 750kBTC

Well that's what people say, yet I haven't seen lots of executives in large companies where scandals have occurred suddenly getting randomly killed by hitmen in the streets. And Madoff's still alive, too.

But isn't that just one of the differences between a regulated business and an unregulated one?

Madoff isn't dead, but he is in prison.

Wait, nobody said that MtGox's CEO won't go in prison. There will be a lawsuit following the losses. The Law still applies when you start taking money for a service.

You can't sue someone into jail

Debtor's prison?

I'd be curious to see exactly what MtGox warranted and represented. I'd guess it's fairly likely that there's no fraud.

Well, a gentleman flew all the way from the UK to Japan to have a polite chat with him, so it's not outside of reality for someone to do bad things to him fairly easily.

Beyond that, CEO's of large companies are generally under guard when the crap hits the fan, and Madoff was protected by police.

I wouldn't be surprised if the "CEO" of Mt. Gox soon finds out what a tire iron tastes like.

Death threats on HN. That's a first.

Oh, please. How sensitive can people get? That was hardly a threat.

How, exactly, was this a death threat? I find your response to be quite befuddling.

Tastes irony.

Executives of large banks have the protection of the larger system to fall back on, Mt Gox, not so much.

Madoff swindled the rich iirc.

There was the Bre-X scandal where a geologist "fell" out of a helicopter and the founder was kidnapped by gunmen (and apparently died later of a brain aneurysm).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bre-X

Japan's mafia is differnt than American's mafia. They are technically savvy and might be more ruthless? (Don't ask me how I know--I was even shocked they exist, but even in Marin County I knew a guy who owed them money, and they were the first one he paid back. I have a huge suspicion that The Yakuza is running Mt. Gox? Asians not involved with gambling--what is that called ironic? And no I not racist, but just pointing out an observation. And funking yes--crypto currency is gambling. It's not backed by anything, other than code, and promises. If banks weren't insured by the federal government I would not keep my money in them. I blindly trust most poor, middle class people. Once they get a few shekels save up--they change. Yes--Most of the wealthy I have been around literally stole their money. Some legally, but many just stole. I hope Internet sleuths can find out what happened at Gox. And God bess the brave who lost their lives in the Ukraine.

Is this an HN comments-seeded Markov chain?

Even if you were a shady drug dealer, revenge doesn't get your money back.

The reason I trust normal contracts to work is that I pay for guys with guns to enforce them. I call them "police", and my payments "tax". But if you are doing deals that are illegal, you have to provide your own enforcement.

The rational interest of a criminal here wouldn't be revenge. It would be reputation maintenance. The reason mafia loan sharks are known for breaking kneecaps isn't that they're personally upset, or that they can't afford the loss. It's that they can't afford anybody else thinking that their loans are something they can walk away from.

That's the theory, anyway. Let me know how it actually goes when you get defrauded and see if that super-reliable infrastructure has your back, or if your case is too small for them to care about.

"The government provides protections" != I can completely trust my contracts to work because of it".

I didn't say it was super-reliable. Or that I trust my contracts to work. But it certainly has been enough for my needs. Despite a lot of years in business, I've never felt a need for extra-judicial enforcement.

Oops! Editing error. Above I mean "to work perfectly".

Sorry, I just didn't see anything in your original post that reflect the actual reality of what law enforcement does when you really get defrauded.

It's not about the money. It's about sending a message.

Oh, come now. Bits don't burn.

Though the idea of making a pile of hard drives and setting that on fire sort of intrigues me...

Given their physical office location I wonder if any Yakuza have(had) any BTC in MtGOX. That could get interesting.

Those kinds of guys don't seem like the type to trade cash, which they know well, for magical internet money that they know nothing about.

The Yakuza have been moving into white-collar and financial crime for decades, and Japan has had cellphone-related quasi-currencies for a long time now. It's not that big a stretch.

Uh. If I was in organized crime and I heard that Bitcoin was a great way to do money laundering, I'd make sure I knew about it. That's half the point of organizing crime to begin with.

How do you know a highly organized unit of crime is technologically illiterate?

Well, the local bunch are certainly not all that sharp from that point of view.

"In April 2006, fugitive Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano was captured in Sicily partly because some of his messages, written in a variation of the Caesar cipher, were broken. Provenzano's cipher used numbers, so that "A" would be written as "4", "B" as "5", and so on.[11]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_cipher

And this wasn't just some bozo, but a Mafia boss who was certainly into a lot of different "lines of business":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardo_Provenzano

Thought experiment.

So your biggest crooked customer has a balance of 10% of your net liabilities. And someone steals 1/3 your net worth so you're basically outta business and the biggest crook on the planet just took a 1/3 haircut, which he's not going to be too happy about.

You tell the biggest baddest gangster of a customer, you can more than triple his current balance at the mere cost of guaranteeing your personal safety in perpetuity and having a crony of his and a crony of yours re-enact the 1/3 theft. After all, you just figured out what happened, and its not going to be too hard to arrange for it again two more times.

So that leaves the biggest crook in the world in debt to you, a fat bank account, and lifetime guarantee of protection from said crook.

Do some deals with the crooks competitors to make sure they know he gave you his word, so if he ever goes back on it they'll never trust him again. Or run the same scheme three times and make sure the top three crooks know that the enemies of the guy who kills you off are going to split your fortune if you croak.

Or lets say you make "all" the BTC disappear but you actually have enough control to reimburse every player big enough and criminal enough to actually hurt you, with millions left over for yourself.

Your biggest customer is about to get powned as a money launderer by the DEA/IRS and his only legal hope is to make your records look untrustworthy. Would any court of law trust MtGox's records after today? I guess there's no proof anymore that some bad guy was about to get powned. Well, there's an easy way and a hard way to do that, at least WRT collateral damage to the execs family members. And if you still tangentially somehow have control of the "lost" money, nobody important need actually hold a grudge.

I'm not saying any of this is true or even possible, although it could be the plot of GTA:7 or similar. These are better hollywood movie plots than the formulaic dreck we're forced to endure.

>These are better hollywood movie plots than the formulaic dreck we're forced to endure.

I'd watch this movie(s).

Best case speculation: they really are being acquired by a more competent exchange, or consortium of competent exchanges, who decided to step in to prevent further harm to Bitcoin's reputation. Hence the hidden message in the html, the acquisition of the "gox.com" domain, and the suspending of all transactions until the official announcement.

hidden message in the HTML? Nothing as of right now http://pastebin.com/yi5j88FG

He's probably talking about earlier, when there was an HTML comment about an acquisition

If someone competent want to start an exchange, why would they pay to be associated with the MtGox brand? After all of this, that brand must be poisonous.

When has the passive voice ever actually worked to calm a lynch mob?

When the speaker exists as a virtual office in another country.

It reminds me of something out of Heinlein's Friday.

I'm getting a little tired of every (justifiably!) angry group of people being called a "lynch mob" by default on the internet.

You might want to wait for something resembling actual violence before applying such an ugly characterization. A bunch of people saying mean things is not a "lynch mob".

There are literally dozens of people on reddit's /r/bitcoin right now casually discussing contract killings, with various shades of joking (from "kinda" to "not at all").

I'm not being hyperbolic.

Isn't that the kind of shit bitcoin was made for? Drugs/contract killings in the "deep web"? Would not surprise me at all if some of those guys are serious, especially if they just lost their life savings.

And it doesn't seem to have been proofread very well. "In the event of [something that has already happened]..."? I don't consider myself a particularly picky person, but come on, you could at least make the effort at a time like this.

Panic doesn't lend itself to careful writing.

Well, sure, but it's not like this message was rushed out within minutes of anything in particular. They seemed quite content to have a completely blank site for hours on end before putting this up.

I don't understand why people put their money/BitCoins in MtGox, if you researched them (previous to this incident) you would find a large number of complaints and shady dealings.

Personally, I put my coins in BTC-e, Virtuex, and CoinBase (and thank god I did). Even though BTC-e and Virtuex seemed fairly sketchy they still allowed me to withdrawal my coins with no issue.

Why not set up a secure offline wallet and keep your coins there?

www.gox.com is now redirecting to mtgox.com.

For an organisation which is insolvent they must have invested a fairly significant sum on a 3 letter .com domain. This happened yesterday! What's going on here?

Insolvent != no money in the bank

Yeah, but shouldn't they try to pay people back before they spend what's likely tens of thousands of dollars on what amounts to superficial marketing? I mean, it's not even much of a re-brand!

> Yeah, but shouldn't they try to pay people back before they spend what's likely tens of thousands of dollars on what amounts to superficial marketing?

"Should" based on the assumption that they are profit-maximizing entity, or "should" based on the assumption that they are a moral actor? Because, you know, the answers are quite different.

I think that "should" is based on "wanting to avoid prosecution for operating while insolvent".

It's fertile breeding grounds for conspiracy theories, so I'm not going to post my elaborate speculation here. I'll just summarise it as "there are several people working at Mt. Gox and they're probably not very good at talking to one another".

They SHOULD pay secured creditors which could include domain provider. I dont imagine its customers are SECURED .. so will be last .. in a proper insolvency..

So I have n bitcoins and $x in MtGox; will I get this back? Will there be a haircut? Is MtGox winding down? So many questions...

Right now it seems likely that the answer is "no". Although who knows...

If there was a chance they could fix this they wouldn't have posted a completely meaningless bullshit message. My guess is that they know it's over, are consulting with lawyers, and are trying to cover their own asses. Being honest would probably hurt them at this stage.

I'm curious about the $x. Seems like getting bitcoins out if it has gone out the window, but since fiat is regulated, wouldn't they be legally required to pay out any fiat their customers have in the system?

I didn't have bitcoins in the system, but I did have a couple hundred dollars. Completely negligible amount and it doesn't really affect me to lose it, but it would be convenient to get it back.

Probably not. But don't give up hope yet.

Give up hope. This thing is toast.

They will be returning all their miner's CPU cycles.

Are you kidding me?

This message is likely worse than staying silent.

Silent would be worse. At least we know that the site is deliberately disabled by its owners, as opposed to a host of other hypotheticals we'd be discussing otherwise.

No. Because this shows that they aren't using some sort of professional crisis management team and are trying to handle it in house. That's ridiculous. They keep showing themselves incapable of handling such a high profile company.

Do they have to hire a team if someone with deeper pockets just came in and said "Shut it down, we're buying you out"?

You may be right that they are incompetent and it shows, but it doesn't necessarily follow that the answer is to right now immediately hire a new team and let them handle it.

But is that really any better? Instead of not trusting hackers/outside entities, you have to deal with not being able to trust the site/company creators. I'd call that worse than staying silent.

This statement inspires absolutely zero confidence and trust at a time when both those things are necessary at some level.

Is this a joke? What's worse than a non-response? Lies. That's what.

That's it??

Yeah, kinda disappointing. That's a company which does not care a bit about their users...

> That's a company which does not care a bit about their users...

Yes, but they cared about their user's bits.

what did you expect, bitcoins?

yup.

I guess this could be taken to mean "the leak was a fake and unanticipated, we closed the markets to prevent even more panic selling"

Maybe there is a faint glimmer of hope for gox... (I personally doubt it)

http://www.coindesk.com/mt-gox-statement-claims-made-conscio...

Sometimes it seems like Mt.Gox is a corporation in EVE Online. Like in EVE, they're trading in virtual goods and there's zero regulation. Similarly, scams are part of the game.

Playing EVE Online taught me to spot scams, pyramids and ponzi schemes in an instant. When I first read about bitcoin I couldnt stop laughing, "people really pay for pretend money counting on price going up so they can sell and earn $? AHAHAHA" was all I could hear in my head.

Turns out I was too smart for my own good. Almost every ponzi scheme can be exploited _if_ you get on board early enough.

At the current stage of bitcoin only suckers are left holding the bag. Of course no one will see it, because "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)" (its a book, read it).

> Turns out I was too smart for my own good. Almost every ponzi scheme can be exploited ...

You're misusing the term "Ponzi scheme". A speculative system that relies on volatility and wishful thinking isn't necessarily a Ponzi scheme (might be but not necessarily).

A classic Ponzi scheme has layers or levels that are treated differently. Ordinary speculation about a volatile entity doesn't have this property.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme

Quote: "Typically, extraordinary returns are promised on the original investment[5] and vague verbal constructions such as "hedge futures trading", "high-yield investment programs", or "offshore investment" might be used. The promoter sells shares to investors by taking advantage of a lack of investor knowledge or competence, or using claims of a proprietary investment strategy which must be kept secret to ensure a competitive edge."

Seems like they concluded that panic selling is over and they can't benefit from this anymore? Too bad many of their customers already sold at much lower prices.

If Bitcoin were a government currency, all Bitcoin users would have to pay for MtGox losses and every MtGox users would get their money back.

That's the price of anarchism.

So at this point, what exchange should someone who has, say, a ton of LTC, go to convert their holdings to Dogecoin?

Cognitive dissonance is strong with you my child (or irony, in which case I failed at detecting it).

Their way of protecting the site and the users is doing precisely the opposite

Well putting together that statement clearly took a lot of work...

> recent news reports

Of which recent news reports are they talking about?

I'm guessing that gox lost ~$400m and is insolvent?

Perhaps the leak was fake, so gox shut down to prevent people panic selling

probably this: http://blog.coinbase.com/post/77766809700/joint-statement-re...

This is insane. No <!doctype> declaration? Come on!

They are just trolling everyone now...

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