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Mt. Gox Halts Bitcoin Withdrawals, Price Drop Follows
- aw3c2 13y agoOh no, my college fund investment!
- Xdes 13y agoI think all of us veteran Bitcoin users saw this coming for awhile now. It's all the new users (<1 year) that are affected. They tend to disregard our advice to steer clear of Mt. Gox (and holding their BTC in an exchange like a bank). They're probably the same people who keep supporting scammers like BFL.
- yebyen 13y agoI bought some Jalapeños from BFL after my January order was not shipped until August, in the Black Friday sale. 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.
- nwh 13y agoThe BFL gear is cute and all, but there's a simple fact with selling Bitcoin mining hardware that is probably never going to be overcome. Why would you sell something you could make profit on if you kept it for yourself? This is pretty much the reason why we have ASICminer, KNCminer and Bitfury all either running or building mammoth sized facilities of their own. I particularly liked this juxtaposition on their store — http://i.imgur.com/uZVKRBX.png http://i.imgur.com/uZVKRBX.png
- yebyen 13y agoI think a more appropriate question is, why would you ship on time when all of your previous customers' viability depends on your delaying new shipments as long as possible?
- morsch 13y agoWhy? How about lack of faith in BTC long-term price stability but existence of faith in people buying mining hardware? 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.
- deelowe 13y agoI can think of one reason: long term risk. It's probably an easier ROI calculation to determine that selling a miner will be profitable vs deploying your own and hoping you'll get large enough returns over a much longer period of time. This is especially true if you take pre-orders.
- scott_s 13y agoThe same reason that people would package and sell mortgage-backed securities, but not keep them for themselves.
- Heliosmaster 13y ago
- dsjoerg 13y agoIs there anyplace I can go to get the summary of advice from the Sage Old Veteran Bitcoin Graybeards?
- pmorici 13y agobitcointalk.org or the bitcoin subredit has this info plastered all over the place. 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.
- my_username_is_ 13y agoI'd steer clear of /r/bitcoin. It's been declining in quality consistently over the several months. bitcointalk or /r/bitcoinserious or even /r/bitcoinbeginners should give you better advice
- my_username_is_ 13y agoI'd steer clear of /r/bitcoin. It's been declining in quality consistently over the several months. bitcointalk or /r/bitcoinserious or even /r/bitcoinbeginners should give you better advice
- lectrick 13y agoBuy when there's blood in the streets (assuming the fundamentals are still good, which it looks like they are...) http://www.bitcoinpulse.com/ http://www.bitcoinpulse.com/
- maxerickson 13y agoCan you explain what you consider to be the more important fundamentals for bitcoin?
- nkuttler 13y agoNumber of users.
- mcherm 13y ago1. Number of users holding bitcoins 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.
- maxerickson 13y agoIs there anybody publishing reliable numbers for any of those?
- plg 13y agoI'm not bitter that when bitcoin was ~ $1/btc I almost bought 1,000 btc ... no not bitter at all :|
- yebyen 13y agoCheer up, some of us actually had bit-fortunes and lost them at Satoshidice :)
- plg 13y agotrue enough. that would be an even worse feeling
- terranstyler 13y agoThose were times, a gamble every 10 minutes, I didn't shave for weeks. I wonder why today lotteries are held only like once a week or so...
- hnnewguy 13y ago>I almost bought 1,000 btc 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.
- if_by_whisky 13y agoBuying into a real company is not speculating on a price change?
- lgieron 13y agoWhat else would you buy it for (assuming no dividends are being paid out)?
- James_Duval 13y ago
- JonSkeptic 13y agoBut Dogecoin is doing well.
- iamjustin 13y agoIt really isn't, it's down to around 0.12 cents per doge. When Bitcoin goes down, it usually drags the rest down with it.
- pistle 13y agoIs this the technical way of shutting your doors to stop the run on the bank?
- tibbon 13y agoIs it just me, or does MTGox seem to be the BTC site that has the most problems? Maybe its just because of their size, but in comparison Coinbase and Blockchain have few problems.
- kirk21 13y agoOk, time to find another exchange. Considering http://www.coinnext.com http://www.coinnext.com and https://localbitcoins.com https://localbitcoins.com Other suggestions?
- x3ro 13y agohttps://www.bitstamp.net/ https://www.bitstamp.net/ ?
- vtempest 13y agoCoinbase.com is a great one, and they recently received venture funding
- commandar 13y agoCoinbase is great for exchanging BTC/USD, but it's not a trading market like mtgox.
- nullc 13y agoCoinbase recently imposed a kind of ludicrous $3000 a day outbound limit on accounts that had previously been limited to 50 BTC/day. 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).
- politician 13y agoWe did that back in the online poker gambling days. The casinos would throttle USD withdrawals, so that the players would be forced to wait and end up losing their chips by playing more. Physical casinos do this by attaching hotels next to the slots. This sounds similar.
- corford 13y agoI've been using http://www.kraken.com http://www.kraken.com of late and it's been great - no problem wiring money to/from my bank account, easy to convert between LTC and BTC and market orders close immediately. 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)
- Spooky23 13y agoWhy does anyone deal with MtGox? Nothing but drama.
- Torn 13y ago> As to get a better look at the process the system needs to be in a static state. The fact they can't spin up a new MtGox environment with cloned data stores is troubling.
- willis77 13y agoI also hope their technical competency beats their writing competency.
- minimax 13y agoConsider this a reminder that while Bitcoin may be an interesting technological achievement, as a tradable asset it is still basically a toy. Crappy exchange technology combined with low liquidity is a perfect recipe for this kind of volatility.
- koliber 13y agoWhile I am in no position to predict the future of bitcoins, all new markets have these problems. At an early point in their history, stocks also had low liquidity and crappy technology. Both of these conditions will improve as an asset becomes more popular. It is a chicken-and-egg problem.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Stubb 13y agoThere's also the question of where the money will come from to improve the technology. One of the benefits of BTC is the low transaction cost. But it might be that those transaction costs are exactly what's needed to fund exchange development.
- RyanZAG 13y agoI think you've hit the nail on the head here - scaling up a real exchange is incredibly difficult and the kind of talent you need to hire probably has a price tag hugely in excess of the revenue of all BTC exchanges combined. These guys are probably struggling to even understand the problems they're experiencing, so it should come as no surprise that they're having technical difficulties. 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.
- jessedhillon 13y ago
- davedx 13y agoInteresting comment on Reddit: "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."
- jessedhillon 13y agoCan you post the link?
- studio816 13y agohttp://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1x9gue/my_protest_at_mtgox_offices_5_to_7th_february/cf9ct0o http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1x9gue/my_protest_a...
- 3pt14159 13y agoI believe it. 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 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.
- ck2 13y agoWhy would the price drop when there are other exchanges open?
- zanny 13y agoWhen you freeze billions of assets markets react. People can't move their Gox btc out, they can't cash out, so a double digit percentage of the market just froze.
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoMtGox is one of the biggest and most well known. As I understand each exchange basically sets there own price - but if one exchange lowers there buy price (they buy bitcoins for less dollars) then the others can do too? 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.
- ck2 13y agoAfter some research (aka googling) I discover the price is not sinking because of mtgox. It is sinking because of Russia. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7197173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7197173
- foobarqux 13y agoMtGox badly needs a financial audit. It's easy to fund operations from deposits and, by having limited withdrawals, hide the fact that you are insolvent.
- zende 13y agoThis is exactly why regulations exist. MtGox should need to register as a Money Service Business (MSB) in the US and as a Money Transmitter in each state that they support. That needs to happen even if they're not a US company. The same applies to the EU, Australia, Canada, and many other countries that have regulations around this kind of activity. 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.
- gabriel34 13y agoSo, is this really a technological issue or a liquidity crisis at Mt. Gox?
- quattrofan 13y agoIt seems a technical issue, they are saying they won't process BTC transactions not that they wont process fiat withdrawals, although those have been slow for months anyway.
- headgsaket 13y ago2 bad news day in a row, and BTC is sensibly at the same price level... This resilience is making me more skeptical of a upcoming crash event. Price stability is sinequanone for acceptance as a currency.
- Gracana 13y agoWell to be fair, the people most affected by this news can't do anything about it.
- patrickg_zill 13y agoOddly funny, that the physical gold and silver buyer's mantra of "if you don't hold it, you don't own it" would apply to BTC.
- canvia 13y agoThere are a lot of similarities. I see a lot of pump and dump terminology used in discussions of both topics as well, such as: 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!