4 ms·

I mean, MtGox stands for "Magic The Gathering Online Exchange". They were literally set up to sell trading cards. The whole "being the biggest bank in a new $6b

by seldo 13y ago

I mean, MtGox stands for "Magic The Gathering Online Exchange". They were literally set up to sell trading cards. The whole "being the biggest bank in a new $6bn+ economy" is a pivot. The whole system is crazy. But even by those standards, taking 35 grand and not noticing you didn't give them what they paid for stands out.

tedunangst 13y ago
But even by those standards, taking 35 grand and not noticing you didn't give them what they paid for stands out. That's really the weird part. This is a business that does money in, money out. They should be balancing the books and checking inventory every day. It can take Amazon a while to realize a mistake because it takes time for somebody to go around the warehouse and count all the boxes to discover they're holding excess inventory. But how long does it take for Coinbase to compare the number in column A to the number in column B?
- jellicle 13y ago
  But that's regulation. And HN is against that. Get with the program.
  - tedunangst 13y ago
    It's not just regulation. It's basic accounting. If you're not doing it, you literally don't know how much money you have. It's always a good idea to know how much money you have, even if the government doesn't require you to know.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago
      You clearly haven't been dealing with businesses. 99% doesn't do daily checks. Many notice thins after a month or so, when closing books for month. And some notice those kind of things aften closing a year. But there still are many businesses which won't ever notice or care missing 100 grand. Been there and done that, and it's much more common than you think. In some of those cases I personally think that the business is partly illegal and bookkeeper is cooking the books. Therefore they don't even notice honest mistakes. I have seen same thing happening over and over again. People don't care about money. And this is business as usual.
      - barrkel 13y ago
        Reconciliation is a fundamental operational procedure of financial entities. It's how they find system failures, process failures, fraud, etc. You take feeds from various systems and correlate them. It's not super complex, but it is fundamental. I actually work for a startup selling reconciliation software as a service to the financial industry, so it's something I'm learning about myself. Lack of it suggests Coinbase are a little bit clueless.
      - PeterisP 13y ago
        If this is really is business as usual, then it might be acceptable for a widget selling company but completely unacceptable for financial services. In financial services the same actions that you describe are gross negligence that (depending on jurisdiction) can mean personal liability, possibly including criminal charges, for the relevant CxOs, and a lifetime ban from running any other financial companies in future. You can't entrust consumer's money to companies being run like that, it's pure nonsense.
        gaadd33 13y ago
        You think that Goldman Sachs, for example, had exactly 263,674,000,000.00 of cash and cash equivalents at the end of 2012? You don't think that's likely rounded to at least the million? In fact it seems that most Fortune 500 companies, regardless of industry round things to the million. It's pretty easy to lose a few hundred thousand if you are doing that.
        rayiner 13y ago
        Auditing standards at large banks have a materiality threshold. At a Goldman or Morgan Stanley, that threshold approaches half a billion. But that's at the top layer, on top of many other layers of accounting. At the level of individual customer accounts, even small discrepancies would be caught.
      - AJ007 13y ago
        Any sort of financial account should be ACID safe. You can't just receive money on one end, and then it magically doesn't enter a client's account. Bitcoin is great, but the exchanges still suck.
  - kaoD 13y ago
    That makes no sense. It is self-regulation. Balancing the books is in their best interest.
  - PKop 13y ago
    You mean without regulation, companies could effectively steal money from you and you would never be able to stop giving it to them? The free market is also regulating, by the way, and it should regulate with its full force against companies like this that fail to provide adequate customer service and satisfaction, safeguards, etc to their customers... we don't need the government to tell us these people aren't doing their jobs effectively and we should take our business elsewhere.
    - specialist 13y ago
      I'm keen to learn more about self regulating free markets. Please provide an example.
- wpietri 13y ago
  I saw somebody today snarking about Bitcoins being Dunning Krugerrands. Coinbase appears to be making their point for them.
locusm 13y ago
MtGox is something like 5 months behind in withdrawls with no confirmed date of when it will occur. I'm waiting on $600 since beginning of Sept...
- AJ007 13y ago
  If this is not some sort of error, MtGox is a ponzi scheme.
  - laichzeit0 13y ago
    I can't remember where I read this and I don't remember all the details, however: As I understand the problem is mainly with USD withdrawals to USA, and the problem is not with MtGox but rather with the bank they use having some legacy issues and that they can only process X transactions a day in batch. Or something to that effect. For this reason I switched to Bitstamp and the experience is night/day different. Bitstamp withdrawals/deposits have so far never taken more than 4 working days, sometimes 3, for me.
nikatwork 13y ago
Aww, you guys are so cute. You think banks have this stuff under control? Auditors will "find" hundreds of millions of dollars of missing assets on the regs. Many banks are powered by duct tape and loose Excel spreadsheets. That's why things like Basel exist.
- rayiner 13y ago
  That's really not true. Yes, auditors do find missing assets like that, but some of these banks have trillions in assets. Moreover, these errors usually aren't things like cash in versus cash out. Accounting and tax rules are very complex. So an error might entail having incorrectly computed the value of certain tax assets or the like. More to the point, a major bank will have layers and layers of accounting controls intended to catch even very small errors. These processes are themselves audited every year, and stress tested. It's not duct tape and excel spreadsheets.
- srdev 13y ago
  Worked at a bank. They have better processes than this. Not gonna say they're perfect, but they can handle balancing their books and not dropping transactions. They certainly don't use a non-ACID PoS like Mongo. Excel was over-used in many places, but was not used for day to day transactions and operations. Yet again, bitcoin apologists inaccurately claim (lie) that banks are actually worse to excuse failings by "their" services.
  - remon 13y ago
    Worked at a bank as what? Working at a bank clearly doesn't make someone an expert on their IT infrastructure. The actual financial transaction infrastructure isn't ACID.
    - srdev 13y ago
      As a software developer on corporate credit card applications, dealing with managing transactions, accounts, and restrictions. Our infrastructure was ACID. We certainly wouldn't have used experimental, flaky datastores like Mongo, and shit was not processed using Excel. No-one is an expert on every part of a bank's infrastructure -- its too big for that. But definitely, we had software requirements, as a matter of IT policy, that kept stuff like MongoDB out of production.
joyce 13y ago
MtGox was a URL that the original founder had, but the bitcoin site was not made originally to sell trading cards. It was made to sell bitcoins and he just used a URL he had.

by seldo 13y ago

tedunangst 13y ago

But even by those standards, taking 35 grand and not noticing you didn't give them what they paid for stands out. That's really the weird part. This is a business that does money in, money out. They should be balancing the books and checking inventory every day. It can take Amazon a while to realize a mistake because it takes time for somebody to go around the warehouse and count all the boxes to discover they're holding excess inventory. But how long does it take for Coinbase to compare the number in column A to the number in column B?

jellicle 13y ago
But that's regulation. And HN is against that. Get with the program.
- tedunangst 13y ago
  It's not just regulation. It's basic accounting. If you're not doing it, you literally don't know how much money you have. It's always a good idea to know how much money you have, even if the government doesn't require you to know.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - Sami_Lehtinen 13y ago
    You clearly haven't been dealing with businesses. 99% doesn't do daily checks. Many notice thins after a month or so, when closing books for month. And some notice those kind of things aften closing a year. But there still are many businesses which won't ever notice or care missing 100 grand. Been there and done that, and it's much more common than you think. In some of those cases I personally think that the business is partly illegal and bookkeeper is cooking the books. Therefore they don't even notice honest mistakes. I have seen same thing happening over and over again. People don't care about money. And this is business as usual.
    - barrkel 13y ago
      Reconciliation is a fundamental operational procedure of financial entities. It's how they find system failures, process failures, fraud, etc. You take feeds from various systems and correlate them. It's not super complex, but it is fundamental. I actually work for a startup selling reconciliation software as a service to the financial industry, so it's something I'm learning about myself. Lack of it suggests Coinbase are a little bit clueless.
    - PeterisP 13y ago
      If this is really is business as usual, then it might be acceptable for a widget selling company but completely unacceptable for financial services. In financial services the same actions that you describe are gross negligence that (depending on jurisdiction) can mean personal liability, possibly including criminal charges, for the relevant CxOs, and a lifetime ban from running any other financial companies in future. You can't entrust consumer's money to companies being run like that, it's pure nonsense.
      - gaadd33 13y ago
        You think that Goldman Sachs, for example, had exactly 263,674,000,000.00 of cash and cash equivalents at the end of 2012? You don't think that's likely rounded to at least the million? In fact it seems that most Fortune 500 companies, regardless of industry round things to the million. It's pretty easy to lose a few hundred thousand if you are doing that.
        rayiner 13y ago
        Auditing standards at large banks have a materiality threshold. At a Goldman or Morgan Stanley, that threshold approaches half a billion. But that's at the top layer, on top of many other layers of accounting. At the level of individual customer accounts, even small discrepancies would be caught.
    - AJ007 13y ago
      Any sort of financial account should be ACID safe. You can't just receive money on one end, and then it magically doesn't enter a client's account. Bitcoin is great, but the exchanges still suck.
- kaoD 13y ago
  That makes no sense. It is self-regulation. Balancing the books is in their best interest.
- PKop 13y ago
  You mean without regulation, companies could effectively steal money from you and you would never be able to stop giving it to them? The free market is also regulating, by the way, and it should regulate with its full force against companies like this that fail to provide adequate customer service and satisfaction, safeguards, etc to their customers... we don't need the government to tell us these people aren't doing their jobs effectively and we should take our business elsewhere.
  - specialist 13y ago
    I'm keen to learn more about self regulating free markets. Please provide an example.
wpietri 13y ago
I saw somebody today snarking about Bitcoins being Dunning Krugerrands. Coinbase appears to be making their point for them.

locusm 13y ago

MtGox is something like 5 months behind in withdrawls with no confirmed date of when it will occur. I'm waiting on $600 since beginning of Sept...

AJ007 13y ago
If this is not some sort of error, MtGox is a ponzi scheme.
- laichzeit0 13y ago
  I can't remember where I read this and I don't remember all the details, however: As I understand the problem is mainly with USD withdrawals to USA, and the problem is not with MtGox but rather with the bank they use having some legacy issues and that they can only process X transactions a day in batch. Or something to that effect. For this reason I switched to Bitstamp and the experience is night/day different. Bitstamp withdrawals/deposits have so far never taken more than 4 working days, sometimes 3, for me.

nikatwork 13y ago

Aww, you guys are so cute. You think banks have this stuff under control? Auditors will "find" hundreds of millions of dollars of missing assets on the regs. Many banks are powered by duct tape and loose Excel spreadsheets. That's why things like Basel exist.

rayiner 13y ago
That's really not true. Yes, auditors do find missing assets like that, but some of these banks have trillions in assets. Moreover, these errors usually aren't things like cash in versus cash out. Accounting and tax rules are very complex. So an error might entail having incorrectly computed the value of certain tax assets or the like. More to the point, a major bank will have layers and layers of accounting controls intended to catch even very small errors. These processes are themselves audited every year, and stress tested. It's not duct tape and excel spreadsheets.
srdev 13y ago
Worked at a bank. They have better processes than this. Not gonna say they're perfect, but they can handle balancing their books and not dropping transactions. They certainly don't use a non-ACID PoS like Mongo. Excel was over-used in many places, but was not used for day to day transactions and operations. Yet again, bitcoin apologists inaccurately claim (lie) that banks are actually worse to excuse failings by "their" services.
- remon 13y ago
  Worked at a bank as what? Working at a bank clearly doesn't make someone an expert on their IT infrastructure. The actual financial transaction infrastructure isn't ACID.
  - srdev 13y ago
    As a software developer on corporate credit card applications, dealing with managing transactions, accounts, and restrictions. Our infrastructure was ACID. We certainly wouldn't have used experimental, flaky datastores like Mongo, and shit was not processed using Excel. No-one is an expert on every part of a bank's infrastructure -- its too big for that. But definitely, we had software requirements, as a matter of IT policy, that kept stuff like MongoDB out of production.

joyce 13y ago

MtGox was a URL that the original founder had, but the bitcoin site was not made originally to sell trading cards. It was made to sell bitcoins and he just used a URL he had.