7 ms·

Mtgox stops trading for 12 hours

96 points by gigavps 14y ago

Nursie 14y ago
So what? Bitcoin's more than just a speculative.... pffft. Sorry, couldn't finish that with a straight face.
- gigavps 14y ago
  I do believe that the bitcoin payment network adds a great deal of value. As for the price of bitcoin, it is still mostly driven by speculation. As a business owner, there is nothing better than being able to transact with anyone, anywhere in the world instantly. You certainly can't do that with credit cards or paypal.
  - Nursie 14y ago
    I'm not sure it's such a great network, when you look at the ability of one service (SatoshiDice) to effectively overload it to the point some people started leaving their transactions out of their blockchain calculations. As a consumer I also actually like the chargeback and other protections afforded to me by paypal and credit cards. --edit-- I'll add that technically I think it's a fantastic achievement, and as an amateur crypto-geek it's fascinating. The people who came up with the scheme and have coded it have done a great job (though there are the aforementioned scalability problems), but I disagree with almost all the design decisions that went into the vision of the thing.
    - kiba 14y ago
      As a consumer I also actually like the chargeback and other protections afforded to me by paypal and credit cards. The flip side is higher price charged by merchants due to higher processing fees. Not to mention that paypal will close down your accounts whenever they feel that you are too suspicious. Of course, with bitcoin, merchants will charge lower fees since they no longer have to worry about chargebacks. Nobody also can't prevent you from spending bitcoin as you like(as long it's your personal wallet).
      - Nursie 14y ago
        As I said, I actually like these features of paypal and CCs, even if prices are slightly higher as a result. I definitely agree that competition in this space would be good, but I don't think throwing out consumer-friendly features is the answer. To me, "no longer have to worry about chargebacks" is the same thing as "can take your money and run, and there's nothing you can do about it".
        kansface 14y ago
        Credit cards are a completely different model. When you hand someone your CC, you say, "please take exactly the amount of money I'd like you to and no more. Oh, and don't take any money out in the future, either." Only stolen bitcoins have this problem.
        Nursie 14y ago
        Not really. You're saying "I authorise exactly this amount of money and no more", and if they then take any more or don't deliver the service it's fraud, and you're protected from that by consumer credit law (at least you are here in the UK).
        nwh 14y ago
        Same. It empowers me as the consumer to get exactly what I paid for.
      - Retric 14y ago
        Raw bit-coins can't do fast transactions without risking double spends. Which limits you to a ~20 min checkout process or using 3rd party services then you deal with whatever their rules are.
  - Cushman 14y ago
    > As a business owner, there is nothing better than being able to transact with anyone, anywhere in the world instantly. You certainly can't do that with credit cards or paypal. How about being able to transact with 99% of your customer base in a reliable, fraud-proof manner?
  - gergles 14y ago
    You also can't "instantly" transact with Bitcoin, unless you're willing to risk a double-spend. You have to wait for confirmations through the blockchain which involve fees AND waiting (or really really long waiting) -- if you're going to pay a fee, why not just use the CC network and get it done instantly? At least when you get an auth from the CC network, you know you're guaranteed the money. When a transaction completes on the blockchain, it's still up in the air until the next block is produced by enough people.
    - wmf 14y ago
      At least when you get an auth from the CC network, you know you're guaranteed the money. Unless there's a chargeback 59 days later. These kinds of arguments can go either way.
- jfoutz 14y ago
  Pretty sure the intrinsic value is all the stuff you can buy on silk road.
- ramchip 14y ago
  Essentially the same comment is reposted in every bitcoin thread. It adds little to the discussion.
- baddox 14y ago
  If the price drops, you use that as clear evidence that your models are correct. If the price rises, well then that's clearly just temporary market irrationality, and it will eventually drop again.
  - Nursie 14y ago
    So far it seems to work that way, yes. And no, not because there's no way a prediction of that sort can fail. Slow, steady gains and a long plateau would disprove me. But this doesn't happen because BTC basically seems to suffer from massive hype cycles.
sks 14y ago
Worst way to stop a crash.
- lucaspiller 14y ago
  Best way to manipulate the market.
- Heliosmaster 14y ago
  well.. it's not unheard of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trading_halt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trading_halt
  - fr0sty 14y ago
    That is only effective if you have all exchanges working in a coordinated fashion. Halting trading on a single exchange (even if it is the largest) does nothing to arrest the fall since trading can (and will) continue at other marketplaces.
    - leishulang 14y ago
      Awesome. I'm buying back in at $8.
      - cjg 14y ago
        Why is this comment exactly the same as the one posted by jeremyjh to the OP two hours before yours.
sgwil 14y ago
Isn't it weird how whenever there's a massive selloff of Bitcoin, Mt. Gox 'experiences a DDoS attack' and closes trading???
- dmm 14y ago
  It's other people that have blamed this on a DDoS attack. MtGox themselves have explicitly denied it. https://mtgox.com/press_release_20130411.html https://mtgox.com/press_release_20130411.html """ First of all we would like to reassure you but no we were not last night victim of a DDoS but instead victim of our own success! """"
  - FireBeyond 14y ago
    Success for an exchange that makes money on trades whether the price is going up or down is a very different beast to success for someone losing half the value of their investment...
nlh 14y ago
As a curious but uninvolved Bitcoin observer, a question: Why haven't any alternate exchanges popped up? Seems that MtGox is still the go-to place to trade, and I keep hearing about their constantly being behind the 8 Ball when it comes to capacity, etc. Or are there other exchanges out there and MtGox just gets all the press because they keep breaking :)
- lucaspiller 14y ago
  MtGox was the one of (or the) first, but there are plenty of others. As I said in another thread earlier, Bitcoin24 [0] is a good, EUR focused, alternative. [0] https://bitcoin-24.com/ https://bitcoin-24.com/
- ghshephard 14y ago
  https://www.cavirtex.com/home https://www.cavirtex.com/home is another alternative. "Cold Storage is the act of sending Bitcoins to an offline wallet address. Access to withdraw these funds must be by a human being and with a computer that is never plugged into the internet. This guarantees that a hacker cannot steal the wallet through the internet. This is done with transaction signing and USB keys to transfer the signed transaction from the offline computer to the online Bitcoin network. Over $500,000USD was stolen from the Exchanges Bitcoinica and Bitfloor by hackers because they did not use cold storage. VirtEx uses cold storage on approximately 80% of customer funds. We keep the remaining 20% in a server ‘hot’ wallet to allow the small daily BTC withdrawal activity to be instant. If the amount of your withdrawal is too large, you will be required to wait for a human to perform a cold storage withdrawal of your funds. We have many different cold storage wallets and use multi-signature authentication so there is never just one person who can access cold storage and large amounts. You can even choose to place 100% of your funds in cold storage with us; however you will not be able to trade the funds unless you withdraw them from cold storage. This feature is coming soon."
  - StavrosK 14y ago
    It's not an excange, but does anyone know how secure blockchain.info's wallets are? Everything I've read says they're very secure, but I haven't seen any unbiased experts say that...
kmfrk 14y ago
Someone made the good point that this is probably in response to the precipitous drop, as Americans are getting up in the morning. https://twitter.com/Brown_Moses/status/322351273045278720 https://twitter.com/Brown_Moses/status/322351273045278720
tlrobinson 14y ago
Bitcoin really needs a more distributed approach to exchanges. I don't know if that means a peer-to-peer exchange solution like Ripple, or just a loosely decentralized collection of exchanges. A production quality open source exchange with focus on performance and security would be awesome.
- tomp 14y ago
  The problem are not bitcoins. The problem are dollars and other fiat currencies. To be able to trade with those, you need to have them deposited in an exchange's account. That's going to be difficult to change.
  - craigyk 14y ago
    Lol, I had to get pretty far down this time to seen the first mention of 'fiat'.
- leishulang 14y ago
  ripples are made by opencoin. opencoin are mtgox ppl. they will manipulate the market at their own interest, just like they did with BTc
ghshephard 14y ago
I'm betting they are using this 48 hour window to upgrade their systems. The most important hint was this: "Additionally trading fees will not be charged within 48 hours of trading resuming (until 2013-04-14 02:00am UTC)." Seems like something they are offering to apologize for the inconvenience. All told, between the 2 days of no trading, plus the 2 days of foregoing fee's, MtGox will forego over $250K of trading fees. That's a pretty big hit. [Edit: Confirmed by MtGox themselves:] -- snip -- Orders will not be accepted for the moment as we need to upgrade our database to accommodate the trading volume. However, you may still cancel your pending and open orders. Trading will resume at 11.00 am JST. Our apologies for the inconvenience caused and thank you for your patience while we work to resolve this issue. ] [Edit #2 - I just realized, they are saying two, somewhat inconsistent messages. Message 1: Trading is halted until 2013-04-12 02:00am UTC to allow the market to cooldown following the drop in price. Message 2: Orders will not be accepted for the moment as we need to upgrade our database to accommodate the trading volume.
- FireBeyond 14y ago
  Funny, that this didn't happen when Bitcoin was climbing into the stratosphere, but when it was crashing. When your trading fees are a percentage of the value of the transaction, and you most likely have a large personal investment in Bitcoin, you have a -highly- vested interest in arresting a crash. And yes, I know that MtGox is hardly the only place you can trade BitCoin, but it's definitely the largest.
  - dangrossman 14y ago
    MtGox's new signup rate has grown significantly in the past month. It went from hundreds to thousands to over 20,000 new traders yesterday. A crash coincides with high volume (1 hour+ trading lag) -- a perfectly technical reason to fix the issues now regardless of the finances. At some point they need to get the new infrastructure in place (see: http://coinlab.com http://coinlab.com).
  - ghshephard 14y ago
    I just transferred all my BitCoins to https://btc-e.com https://btc-e.com - for whatever reason, you are only allowed to withdraw 100 Bitcoins/24 hours. Probably a fraud insurance element - MtGox will cover any fraud, and they are limiting their losses to 100 Bitcoins at a time.
powertower 14y ago
Down to 90-110 USD on some exchanges!
- tlrobinson 14y ago
  $60 on BTC-e
awnird 14y ago
Magic The Gathering Online Exchange
buro9 14y ago
It will be savaged when it comes back online, on some of the other exchanges bitcoin is down to $66 : https://btc-e.com/ https://btc-e.com/
- powertower 14y ago
  I wonder how much of bitcoin's run-up has been due to fraud on MtGox where market manipulators make specific small up-tick buy/sell transactions - that are always moving the price up. Now with MtGox out of the picture, the real demand and supply are meeting.
  - maxerickson 14y ago
    That only works if the honest participants are naively placing market orders and paying zero attention to volume. A thinly traded market is at least a great place to try it.
    - powertower 14y ago
      > That only works if the honest participants are naively placing market orders and paying zero attention to volume. Doesn't that describe the bitcoin market exactly to a T? I mean, I really don't care what the volume or price is - if I'm buying coins to spend on SilkRoad that day. Which BTW, bootstraped Bitcoin from zero to 30 at least, and probably makes up 15-35% of the real demand (real value) for it to this day (with the other major fraction being gambling sites)! Nor do any of the get-in-quick-on-this-new-thing speculators that buy after reading the latest bitcoin article. And this all fits the fact that when the major EX closes, prices go down drastically on all the other smaller EXs. They should be going up instead for obvious reasons (with such hot demand)! But they go down! Explain that one to me please.
      - maxerickson 14y ago
        I think the difficulty of moving dollars in and out of the various exchanges makes it risky to draw much conclusions about which way things should go when Mt. Gox is down (A vaguely reasonable explanation would be that people get a little more sell happy on bad news, with a limited supply of dollars looking to buy). My intent was a little sardonic though.
eric970 14y ago
Has anybody seen their bulletins? Their first one advised people to go celebrate their "success" by drinking Champaign. Never mind that their exchange just lost ~half of its net value. Yuck!
jeremyjh 14y ago
Awesome. I'm buying back in at $8.
RutZap 14y ago
Hopefully this will move some of the trade volume on other markets. Having most of the trade of a decentralised currency on one market is not a good idea, and I see it as something that goes against the idea of decentralisation.
secalex 14y ago
At least tulips had some innate utility.
- iso8859-1 14y ago
  Which is?
  - emillerm 14y ago
    You can use them to decorate the memorial for your life savings :)
  - Nursie 14y ago
    in an emergency you can eat them? http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19940313&slug=1899951 http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=199...
  - agilescale 14y ago
    They are pretty.
  - kaoD 14y ago
    They're physical. You can wipe your ass with tulips but Bitcoin can't help you there.
waterlesscloud 14y ago
Well, I guess that answers the question about Bitcoin, whether it will be the dominant cryptocurrency. The answer is no. So now the question is, how long until an acceptable cryptocurrency comes along? And what does version 2.0 look like?
- kaoD 14y ago
  I don't know how it'll look like, but I know how it will NOT look like. It will not look like a currency tied to an exchange run by amateurs.
  - blhack 14y ago
    How long do you get to keep calling them amateurs? They are running an exchange that deals with millions of dollars of money, and people continue to use them. They're not amateurs anymore.
    - kaoD 14y ago
      As long as their methods are still amateurish. They're just taking off.
      - kolinko 14y ago
        They are the ones of the very few that survived countless hacks and somehow managed to deal with the legal issues. Perhaps they're amateurs, but they are the best amateurs we've got.
- antonb2011 14y ago
  "The Next Cryptocurrecy" is correct and is the phrase that tells you everything you need to know. The proponents of Bitcoin try to pass it off as being "As Good as Gold". However, unlike gold, whose supply is limited on Earth, and cannot be expanded without radical measures (asteroid mining or nuclear fusion), you can make as many new cryptocurrencies as you want. I might also have a couple of hash functions up my sleeve, whose solutions are difficult to compute, and so are "limited" in supply. Limited, that is, until someone comes up with next ByteCoin, CryptoCoin, ScamCoin etc. Additionally, a shallow market is always a perfect pump-and-dump opportunity. Say you have a stock (or Bitcoin) that only has a volume of $100,000 a day. Then, if you're a small hedge fund and have about $20,000,000 devoted to small cap growth, or emerging market currencies, and your investment mandate allows you a temporary tactical deviation, you can buy the WHOLE supply of an asset for several WEEKS sending the price through the roof. When the crowd catches on and starts pumping money into your asset you exit the market and allow it to crash. Is it legal? No. Does it happen all the time? YES!

96 points by gigavps 14y ago

Nursie 14y ago

So what? Bitcoin's more than just a speculative.... pffft. Sorry, couldn't finish that with a straight face.

gigavps 14y ago
I do believe that the bitcoin payment network adds a great deal of value. As for the price of bitcoin, it is still mostly driven by speculation. As a business owner, there is nothing better than being able to transact with anyone, anywhere in the world instantly. You certainly can't do that with credit cards or paypal.
- Nursie 14y ago
  I'm not sure it's such a great network, when you look at the ability of one service (SatoshiDice) to effectively overload it to the point some people started leaving their transactions out of their blockchain calculations. As a consumer I also actually like the chargeback and other protections afforded to me by paypal and credit cards. --edit-- I'll add that technically I think it's a fantastic achievement, and as an amateur crypto-geek it's fascinating. The people who came up with the scheme and have coded it have done a great job (though there are the aforementioned scalability problems), but I disagree with almost all the design decisions that went into the vision of the thing.
  - kiba 14y ago
    As a consumer I also actually like the chargeback and other protections afforded to me by paypal and credit cards. The flip side is higher price charged by merchants due to higher processing fees. Not to mention that paypal will close down your accounts whenever they feel that you are too suspicious. Of course, with bitcoin, merchants will charge lower fees since they no longer have to worry about chargebacks. Nobody also can't prevent you from spending bitcoin as you like(as long it's your personal wallet).
    - Nursie 14y ago
      As I said, I actually like these features of paypal and CCs, even if prices are slightly higher as a result. I definitely agree that competition in this space would be good, but I don't think throwing out consumer-friendly features is the answer. To me, "no longer have to worry about chargebacks" is the same thing as "can take your money and run, and there's nothing you can do about it".
      - kansface 14y ago
        Credit cards are a completely different model. When you hand someone your CC, you say, "please take exactly the amount of money I'd like you to and no more. Oh, and don't take any money out in the future, either." Only stolen bitcoins have this problem.
        Nursie 14y ago
        Not really. You're saying "I authorise exactly this amount of money and no more", and if they then take any more or don't deliver the service it's fraud, and you're protected from that by consumer credit law (at least you are here in the UK).
      - nwh 14y ago
        Same. It empowers me as the consumer to get exactly what I paid for.
    - Retric 14y ago
      Raw bit-coins can't do fast transactions without risking double spends. Which limits you to a ~20 min checkout process or using 3rd party services then you deal with whatever their rules are.
- Cushman 14y ago
  > As a business owner, there is nothing better than being able to transact with anyone, anywhere in the world instantly. You certainly can't do that with credit cards or paypal. How about being able to transact with 99% of your customer base in a reliable, fraud-proof manner?
- gergles 14y ago
  You also can't "instantly" transact with Bitcoin, unless you're willing to risk a double-spend. You have to wait for confirmations through the blockchain which involve fees AND waiting (or really really long waiting) -- if you're going to pay a fee, why not just use the CC network and get it done instantly? At least when you get an auth from the CC network, you know you're guaranteed the money. When a transaction completes on the blockchain, it's still up in the air until the next block is produced by enough people.
  - wmf 14y ago
    At least when you get an auth from the CC network, you know you're guaranteed the money. Unless there's a chargeback 59 days later. These kinds of arguments can go either way.
jfoutz 14y ago
Pretty sure the intrinsic value is all the stuff you can buy on silk road.
ramchip 14y ago
Essentially the same comment is reposted in every bitcoin thread. It adds little to the discussion.
baddox 14y ago
If the price drops, you use that as clear evidence that your models are correct. If the price rises, well then that's clearly just temporary market irrationality, and it will eventually drop again.
- Nursie 14y ago
  So far it seems to work that way, yes. And no, not because there's no way a prediction of that sort can fail. Slow, steady gains and a long plateau would disprove me. But this doesn't happen because BTC basically seems to suffer from massive hype cycles.

sks 14y ago

Worst way to stop a crash.

lucaspiller 14y ago
Best way to manipulate the market.
Heliosmaster 14y ago
well.. it's not unheard of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trading_halt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trading_halt
- fr0sty 14y ago
  That is only effective if you have all exchanges working in a coordinated fashion. Halting trading on a single exchange (even if it is the largest) does nothing to arrest the fall since trading can (and will) continue at other marketplaces.
  - leishulang 14y ago
    Awesome. I'm buying back in at $8.
    - cjg 14y ago
      Why is this comment exactly the same as the one posted by jeremyjh to the OP two hours before yours.

sgwil 14y ago

Isn't it weird how whenever there's a massive selloff of Bitcoin, Mt. Gox 'experiences a DDoS attack' and closes trading???

dmm 14y ago
It's other people that have blamed this on a DDoS attack. MtGox themselves have explicitly denied it. https://mtgox.com/press_release_20130411.html https://mtgox.com/press_release_20130411.html """ First of all we would like to reassure you but no we were not last night victim of a DDoS but instead victim of our own success! """"
- FireBeyond 14y ago
  Success for an exchange that makes money on trades whether the price is going up or down is a very different beast to success for someone losing half the value of their investment...

nlh 14y ago

As a curious but uninvolved Bitcoin observer, a question: Why haven't any alternate exchanges popped up? Seems that MtGox is still the go-to place to trade, and I keep hearing about their constantly being behind the 8 Ball when it comes to capacity, etc. Or are there other exchanges out there and MtGox just gets all the press because they keep breaking :)

lucaspiller 14y ago
MtGox was the one of (or the) first, but there are plenty of others. As I said in another thread earlier, Bitcoin24 [0] is a good, EUR focused, alternative. [0] https://bitcoin-24.com/ https://bitcoin-24.com/
ghshephard 14y ago
https://www.cavirtex.com/home https://www.cavirtex.com/home is another alternative. "Cold Storage is the act of sending Bitcoins to an offline wallet address. Access to withdraw these funds must be by a human being and with a computer that is never plugged into the internet. This guarantees that a hacker cannot steal the wallet through the internet. This is done with transaction signing and USB keys to transfer the signed transaction from the offline computer to the online Bitcoin network. Over $500,000USD was stolen from the Exchanges Bitcoinica and Bitfloor by hackers because they did not use cold storage. VirtEx uses cold storage on approximately 80% of customer funds. We keep the remaining 20% in a server ‘hot’ wallet to allow the small daily BTC withdrawal activity to be instant. If the amount of your withdrawal is too large, you will be required to wait for a human to perform a cold storage withdrawal of your funds. We have many different cold storage wallets and use multi-signature authentication so there is never just one person who can access cold storage and large amounts. You can even choose to place 100% of your funds in cold storage with us; however you will not be able to trade the funds unless you withdraw them from cold storage. This feature is coming soon."
- StavrosK 14y ago
  It's not an excange, but does anyone know how secure blockchain.info's wallets are? Everything I've read says they're very secure, but I haven't seen any unbiased experts say that...

kmfrk 14y ago

Someone made the good point that this is probably in response to the precipitous drop, as Americans are getting up in the morning. https://twitter.com/Brown_Moses/status/322351273045278720 https://twitter.com/Brown_Moses/status/322351273045278720

tlrobinson 14y ago

Bitcoin really needs a more distributed approach to exchanges. I don't know if that means a peer-to-peer exchange solution like Ripple, or just a loosely decentralized collection of exchanges. A production quality open source exchange with focus on performance and security would be awesome.

tomp 14y ago
The problem are not bitcoins. The problem are dollars and other fiat currencies. To be able to trade with those, you need to have them deposited in an exchange's account. That's going to be difficult to change.
- craigyk 14y ago
  Lol, I had to get pretty far down this time to seen the first mention of 'fiat'.
leishulang 14y ago
ripples are made by opencoin. opencoin are mtgox ppl. they will manipulate the market at their own interest, just like they did with BTc

ghshephard 14y ago

I'm betting they are using this 48 hour window to upgrade their systems. The most important hint was this: "Additionally trading fees will not be charged within 48 hours of trading resuming (until 2013-04-14 02:00am UTC)." Seems like something they are offering to apologize for the inconvenience. All told, between the 2 days of no trading, plus the 2 days of foregoing fee's, MtGox will forego over $250K of trading fees. That's a pretty big hit. [Edit: Confirmed by MtGox themselves:] -- snip -- Orders will not be accepted for the moment as we need to upgrade our database to accommodate the trading volume. However, you may still cancel your pending and open orders. Trading will resume at 11.00 am JST. Our apologies for the inconvenience caused and thank you for your patience while we work to resolve this issue. ] [Edit #2 - I just realized, they are saying two, somewhat inconsistent messages. Message 1: Trading is halted until 2013-04-12 02:00am UTC to allow the market to cooldown following the drop in price. Message 2: Orders will not be accepted for the moment as we need to upgrade our database to accommodate the trading volume.

FireBeyond 14y ago
Funny, that this didn't happen when Bitcoin was climbing into the stratosphere, but when it was crashing. When your trading fees are a percentage of the value of the transaction, and you most likely have a large personal investment in Bitcoin, you have a -highly- vested interest in arresting a crash. And yes, I know that MtGox is hardly the only place you can trade BitCoin, but it's definitely the largest.
- dangrossman 14y ago
  MtGox's new signup rate has grown significantly in the past month. It went from hundreds to thousands to over 20,000 new traders yesterday. A crash coincides with high volume (1 hour+ trading lag) -- a perfectly technical reason to fix the issues now regardless of the finances. At some point they need to get the new infrastructure in place (see: http://coinlab.com http://coinlab.com).
- ghshephard 14y ago
  I just transferred all my BitCoins to https://btc-e.com https://btc-e.com - for whatever reason, you are only allowed to withdraw 100 Bitcoins/24 hours. Probably a fraud insurance element - MtGox will cover any fraud, and they are limiting their losses to 100 Bitcoins at a time.

powertower 14y ago

Down to 90-110 USD on some exchanges!

tlrobinson 14y ago
$60 on BTC-e

awnird 14y ago

Magic The Gathering Online Exchange

buro9 14y ago

It will be savaged when it comes back online, on some of the other exchanges bitcoin is down to $66 : https://btc-e.com/ https://btc-e.com/

powertower 14y ago
I wonder how much of bitcoin's run-up has been due to fraud on MtGox where market manipulators make specific small up-tick buy/sell transactions - that are always moving the price up. Now with MtGox out of the picture, the real demand and supply are meeting.
- maxerickson 14y ago
  That only works if the honest participants are naively placing market orders and paying zero attention to volume. A thinly traded market is at least a great place to try it.
  - powertower 14y ago
    > That only works if the honest participants are naively placing market orders and paying zero attention to volume. Doesn't that describe the bitcoin market exactly to a T? I mean, I really don't care what the volume or price is - if I'm buying coins to spend on SilkRoad that day. Which BTW, bootstraped Bitcoin from zero to 30 at least, and probably makes up 15-35% of the real demand (real value) for it to this day (with the other major fraction being gambling sites)! Nor do any of the get-in-quick-on-this-new-thing speculators that buy after reading the latest bitcoin article. And this all fits the fact that when the major EX closes, prices go down drastically on all the other smaller EXs. They should be going up instead for obvious reasons (with such hot demand)! But they go down! Explain that one to me please.
    - maxerickson 14y ago
      I think the difficulty of moving dollars in and out of the various exchanges makes it risky to draw much conclusions about which way things should go when Mt. Gox is down (A vaguely reasonable explanation would be that people get a little more sell happy on bad news, with a limited supply of dollars looking to buy). My intent was a little sardonic though.

eric970 14y ago

Has anybody seen their bulletins? Their first one advised people to go celebrate their "success" by drinking Champaign. Never mind that their exchange just lost ~half of its net value. Yuck!

jeremyjh 14y ago

Awesome. I'm buying back in at $8.

RutZap 14y ago

Hopefully this will move some of the trade volume on other markets. Having most of the trade of a decentralised currency on one market is not a good idea, and I see it as something that goes against the idea of decentralisation.

secalex 14y ago

At least tulips had some innate utility.

iso8859-1 14y ago
Which is?
- emillerm 14y ago
  You can use them to decorate the memorial for your life savings :)
- Nursie 14y ago
  in an emergency you can eat them? http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19940313&slug=1899951 http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=199...
- agilescale 14y ago
  They are pretty.
- kaoD 14y ago
  They're physical. You can wipe your ass with tulips but Bitcoin can't help you there.

waterlesscloud 14y ago

Well, I guess that answers the question about Bitcoin, whether it will be the dominant cryptocurrency. The answer is no. So now the question is, how long until an acceptable cryptocurrency comes along? And what does version 2.0 look like?

kaoD 14y ago
I don't know how it'll look like, but I know how it will NOT look like. It will not look like a currency tied to an exchange run by amateurs.
- blhack 14y ago
  How long do you get to keep calling them amateurs? They are running an exchange that deals with millions of dollars of money, and people continue to use them. They're not amateurs anymore.
  - kaoD 14y ago
    As long as their methods are still amateurish. They're just taking off.
    - kolinko 14y ago
      They are the ones of the very few that survived countless hacks and somehow managed to deal with the legal issues. Perhaps they're amateurs, but they are the best amateurs we've got.
antonb2011 14y ago
"The Next Cryptocurrecy" is correct and is the phrase that tells you everything you need to know. The proponents of Bitcoin try to pass it off as being "As Good as Gold". However, unlike gold, whose supply is limited on Earth, and cannot be expanded without radical measures (asteroid mining or nuclear fusion), you can make as many new cryptocurrencies as you want. I might also have a couple of hash functions up my sleeve, whose solutions are difficult to compute, and so are "limited" in supply. Limited, that is, until someone comes up with next ByteCoin, CryptoCoin, ScamCoin etc. Additionally, a shallow market is always a perfect pump-and-dump opportunity. Say you have a stock (or Bitcoin) that only has a volume of $100,000 a day. Then, if you're a small hedge fund and have about $20,000,000 devoted to small cap growth, or emerging market currencies, and your investment mandate allows you a temporary tactical deviation, you can buy the WHOLE supply of an asset for several WEEKS sending the price through the roof. When the crowd catches on and starts pumping money into your asset you exit the market and allow it to crash. Is it legal? No. Does it happen all the time? YES!