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MtGox.com is offline
- colinbartlett 13y agoWell, it looks like that document was not a hoax: http://www.scribd.com/doc/209050732/MtGox-Situation-Crisis-Strategy-Draft http://www.scribd.com/doc/209050732/MtGox-Situation-Crisis-S... Related: http://blog.coinbase.com/post/77766809700/joint-statement-regarding-mtgox http://blog.coinbase.com/post/77766809700/joint-statement-re...
- trothoun 13y agoIt may not be a hoax, but it is definitely wishful thinking.
- jhspaybar 13y agoHow this plays out will be very interesting. Sure, I've studied bank runs, and currency events in school, but to actually see it as it happens...I hope economists are paying attention, there could be some awesome research coming out of this whole event!
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- untog 13y agoHello, downsides of unregulated currency. Some of the rules are there for a reason.
- agorabinary 13y agoExcept when the rules result in say, Weimar.
- untog 13y agoWell, sure. It would be pretty idiotic to suggest that every rule ever thought up was a good idea.
- dnautics 13y agono but there's a pretty bad track record of currency collapse. Diocletian. Confederate States of America. Weimar. Yugoslavia. Argentina. Zimbabwe. Venezuela. Edit: Looking at my list, I should have listed one for every alphabet Letter, instead of going chronologically.
- anigbrowl 13y agoconsidering the time spans and number of countries, that's not actually that bad. Sure, there have been many other less famous examples, but the thing is that hyperinflation and currency collapse is actually quite rare. A lot of bitcoin boosters seemed to be under the impression that it was both inevitable and frequent. Also, this list is strongly correlated with catastrophic economic/political problems, as opposed to countries that were rolling along just fine until a sudden monetary-policy mistake.
- dnautics 13y agowell, small catastophes aggregate themselves in centralized economies. I'll strongly suggest you read this (which I linked to above): [0]http://www.overstock.com/Books-Movies-Music-Games/The-Mis-Behavior-of-Markets-A-Fractal-View-of-Financial-Turbulence-Paperback/1742370/product.html?refccid=GSUOBJC4S2E3ZDKGRT73NX6FC4&searchidx=0 http://www.overstock.com/Books-Movies-Music-Games/The-Mis-Be... Financial losses and windfalls / catastrophes happen far more frequently than you'd expect. Also, my list is subject to dnautic's memory bias. Those are the names that I remember. There are certainly more. There is no currency in the history of the world that has lasted forever.
- dnautics 13y agoPlumbing my memory, I can add another: Brazil The cruzeiro was replaced by the "cruzeiro real" literally "real cruzeiro", as a hack to recover from poor fiscal policy resulting in hyperinflation. The cruzeiro real was then replaced by the 'real'. Imagine things getting so bad that the government decides to rebrand its old currency as 'fake'.
- thesimpsons1022 13y agoBecause bad rules can exist doesn't mean all rules are bad. Just because bad can laws exist doesn't mean all laws are bad. libertarians can't seem to understand this.
- FLUX-YOU 13y agoBrings back memories of banking scams in EVE Online
- dmm 13y agoBusinesses fail all the time. Most startups fail. Should we have more startup regulation? Failure is a normal part of the market. What's really scary are the businesses that are never allowed to fail.
- untog 13y agoStartups tend not to hold vast sums of money on behalf of their customers.
- smellelderberry 13y agoYeeaaahh regulated companies that handle vast amounts of money for their customers never get into any trouble.
- landryraccoon 13y agoIf you're talking about banks, they're insured and if the bank fails you still get your money back though.
- smellelderberry 13y agoYou mean with that $25B that FDIC has to insure $10T of deposits? That insurance? http://www.occ.gov/topics/capital-markets/financial-markets/trading/derivatives/dq312.pdf http://www.occ.gov/topics/capital-markets/financial-markets/...
- leot 13y agoDepending on the nature of the risk, yes, that might be enough insurance. Bank deposit insurance is fascinating: it largely exists to prevent bank runs, which are caused by people believing they won't get their money out. Having any insurance means that people have less reason to believe there's a chance they won't get paid back, which decreases the probability of a run on the bank, which decreases the risk associated with the insurance, which decreases the amount of insurance needed.
- crassus 13y agoWhere we're going, the rules will be written in software
- the_ancient 13y agoYes because government currency is such a Utopia......
- colept 13y agoThis is the very reason why Bitcoin needs to policed from a decentralized standpoint. I don't know much about the logistics of crypto-currencies but from my understanding there are public/private keys involved. It should be possible that one can blacklist their own bitcoin address by using the private key. This way at least crooks cannot make off or use the stolen coins. Do any more technical Bitcoin fanatics have any thoughts about this?
- plaguuuuuu 13y agoFirst, it would be pretty disastrous being able to blacklist money after spending it (by giving it to someone else) Second, AFAIK crooks need the private key to steal it, so wouldn't work anyway.
- wmf 13y agoPeople usually don't refer to securing their own money as "blacklisting". Look into cold wallets, hardware wallets, and multisignature transactions.
- baddox 13y agoHow would any existing regulated system handle a similar situation to this? Or are you suggesting that bad things like this never happen in regulated systems?
- smellelderberry 13y agoBailouts.
- djur 13y agoBailouts, plus a regulatory apparatus making fraud and deception harder to get away with, plus criminal and civil liability for illegal financial activity. But what's the state good for anyway?
- smellelderberry 13y agoBy "civil liability," do you mean fining a company $10M for stealing $100B? And let's not pretend that bankers go to jail often.
- FedRegister 13y agoI'd support if you mean "death by hanging in the public square" by criminal liability for illegal financial activity. Make the corporation pay back every penny they got illegally, then hang the bastards high to set an example.
- logicchains 13y agoSo instead of the the people who knowingly took a risk in investing in a risky prospect suffering, taxpayers who took no such risks have to foot the bill instead? Great.
- smellelderberry 13y agoNo no no, I meant a bailout by Saint Satoshi. He will return on the 13th day after the fall of Gox to reimburse all its users.
- Sidnicious 13y agoThey serve some obfuscated JavaScript if you don't have a cookie: <html> <head> <title>MtGox.com loading</title> </head> <body> <p>Please wait...</p> <script> function xdec(data) { var o = "rnBEt3XYIimD807pKGVwMLgbTFQWflO1CHv4eAR6Uc5odsNa_x9qy2ukJZ-jzPSh="; 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('0X8_0wFvF4iv0q898gGR8Ee9FRMJT4neFRGe840e8qrPKuxaOXA6Wef').replace(String.fromCharCode(0), '').split('').reverse().join(''); location.href = '/'; </script> </body> </html>
- tibbon 13y agoI've been staring at too much code today... what the hell does that likely do?
- meowface 13y agoThe "lazy route" when dealing with obfuscated Javascript is to replace final calls with `console.log`. Often it'll be `eval` you want to replace, but here you just remove the document.cookie assignment and log the rvalue.
- meowface 13y agoThat JS sets this cookie: GngixolC=03d32ddfd0b8ef290fd1237b2fb650c4 Almost certainly an md5 hash given the length. No idea what the significance is, though.
- tibbon 13y agoIts too early to say how this will go down in the end for Bitcoin (lawsuits, public policy, pricing, etc), but it certainly is a dark mark. Somewhere between management woes, terrible communication and technical ineptitude will make this a case study for the future for what not to do on all fronts. All businesses have risk, but it would appear they took an amazing opportunity and squandered it entirely. To be at the forefront of an opportunity like this, and then to screw it up royally for yourself, your users and the community at large is simply tragic. Much failure. Very wow.
- agorabinary 13y agoSo...now that mt.gox is dead, does this mean mt gox employees are free from any non-disclosure agreements and can talk freely about what the hell happened? Insider info would be greatly appreciated.
- camus2 13y agoIf i was a Mt Gox employee,I would go into hiding and keep quiet instead of going public, all sort of people have invested into Gox including the kind of people you dont want to mess with.
- fencepost 13y agoBut on the plus side, many of those people no longer have the Silk Road and large supplies of Bitcoin available for "services."
- agorabinary 13y agoIt's probably more likely that many employees were oblivious to the insolvency. As long as everyone's accounts were "credited" as they should, regardless of the soundness of their cold storage accounts, it would appear as though everything was fine. See: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ysaz2/sarahcoinbit_from_mtgox_support_says_there_is_no/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1ysaz2/sarahcoinbit...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- terranstyler 13y agoThe kind of people that (unlike mafia or the police) don't need physical proximity to make your life a nightmare...
- SomeoneWeird 13y agoThat's not how NDAs work.
- Titanous 13y ago$ curl -I https://www.mtgox.com HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable Server: AkamaiGHost Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 176 Expires: Tue, 25 Feb 2014 03:38:10 GMT Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2014 03:38:10 GMT Connection: keep-alive
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- taspeotis 13y agoWith credit to /r/bitcoin, I got a chuckle out of this one: Sorry, due to a major bug in the WWW protocol, our website is temporarily unavailable. Thank you for your patience while we await Al Gore's instruction!
- jfoutz 13y agoJokes like this make me crazy. Seriously HTTP is layer 7. Why would you bother the former senator with anything above 4? tcp/ip is just fine. your buggy code is what's broken, thank you very much.
- ryanobjc 13y agoI believe the proper honorific is to reference the highest office, so it's the Vice President Al Gore.
- jfoutz 13y agoAh, indeed. I always feel a little guilty about editing posts, so i'm going to let it stand. This one especially, because it's such a reddit joke. But yes, you are correct.
- RRRA 13y agoSo, who the other day said they would be buying if BTC felt bellow 500$? Now seems to be the time if they still believe that arbitrary value still makes sense.
- dnautics 13y agothat would be me, maybe? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6867999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6867999 Note the date on this... 79 days ago the price of BTC was in the 1.0k range.
- lhnz 13y agoWhat's an "autodraw" by the way?
- dnautics 13y agocoinbase has a feature where you can set up recurring draws.
- guiambros 13y agoI'm with you. In fact I've been buying some in the 500-550 range, and looking forward to the upcoming drop this week. It wouldn't surprise me it reaches the 350-400 level, when Gox announces it is officially dead.
- RRRA 13y agoI see he was not alone! But it was more likely in the past 10 days or so... :)
- smtddr 13y agoI planned to and actually tried today, but... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7294217 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7294217 Coinbase.com ran out of coins to sell. I gotta wait until Friday and hope the price is still sub 500. EDIT: Whoa! Coinbase.com allowed me do it just now! http://i.imgur.com/VKvNRhN.png http://i.imgur.com/VKvNRhN.png ...I hope this actually works.
- lazyloop 13y agoThe big questions now, what does this mean for BTC prices and which exchanges can still be trusted? Perhaps a good time to invest after the inevitable collapse tomorrow.
- fletchowns 13y agoThey will go down. None of them.
- smtddr 13y agoYou are not suppose to trust any exchange to large sums of coins. You buy, you transfer out immediately.
- sillysaurus3 13y agoHmm... It seems I was wrong. Well, damn. Oh well.
- fchollet 13y agoSo do you still have all your savings in BTC?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- smtddr 13y agoI'm sorry this didn't work out. I want to hope that they'll at least try to pay people back, but I can't bring myself to believe there's any funds to fill what they've lost.
- grey-area 13y agoI read a few of your other posts about BTC and your investment. Kudos on the honest reporting of your motivations and hopes regarding BTC - it was interesting to read them, whatever you think of Bitcoin. This is the best way to take this sort of loss, and hopefully when you think of it over the long-term you have not lost a significant amount of money. At this point it's better to write off the loss as a lesson learned and move on with other things.
- pedalpete 13y agoSlight drop over the last few hours http://bitcoinwisdom.com/ http://bitcoinwisdom.com/ I'm curious if this will create a run on bitcoin or not? All of the funds from MtGox have in theory already been lost. There may be some fear that other networks will follow, but it may be rational that the price would remain level as one failed bank does not equal a failed currency.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- newbrict 13y agoWhy would they pull the site down?
- lazyloop 13y agoHide as much information as possible to avoid class action lawsuits?
- llamataboot 13y agoSeems to make a lawsuit even more likely. Evidence of something to hide?
- guelo 13y agoPretty good Ponzi. Not as impressive as Bernie Maddof's, but extra points for the tech angle.
- colinbartlett 13y agoI would say quite a bit more impressive as Madoff did the same thing that's been done hundreds of times before: take money and promise huge returns. Here we have a company that took money and let the "investors" fight it out amongst themselves.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agoHow in the hell did these guys manage to screw this up so badly? Think about the tx fees they were raking in.
- 345723 13y agoMaybe they didn't screw up. Maybe they just cashed out.
- jmomo 13y agoI am not aware of any indication that this was a ponzi scheme. Saying that it was, without evidence, is misinformation. The loss of coins was unintentional on the behalf of MtGox. It may have been stupid that basic abc123 auditing would have probably revealed that there was a problem months/years ago, but evil has not been shown at this point in time.
- Klinky 13y agoAn exchange that manipulates it's market to hide away losses and try to shore up it's balances starts to look a lot like a ponzi scheme after awhile.
- jamesaguilar 13y agoOnly given an unacceptably broad interpretation of the word "Ponzi." Fraud is the one you're looking for.
- edj 13y agoQuestions I have now: 1) How likely is a cascade of bank runs on other exchanges? 2) Do other exchanges have security issues or insolvency that make them particularly vulnerable? 3) Will one of the other cryptocurrencies wax as confidence in BTC wanes?
- dnautics 13y ago1) unlikely, since cascading bank runs are usually a result of fractional reserve banking. Depositors in a collapsed bank are unable to pay off loans in another bank, causing collateral damage to this other bank. 2) do other exchanges have security issues? Yes. Are they vulnerable? Only time will tell. I would take Mandelbrot's modeling of insurers (banks are "insurers" of sorts) in "the (Mis)behaviour of markets[0]" to heed: Collapses are levy-distributed with fat tails (infinite variance) so they will happen more frequently than you think, especially if you are operating with a model that uses the normal distribution. Best practice is to diversify. 3) I doubt it. ADDENDUM: But in a rational world this incident (might take a bit of time for the market to realize this) should actually INCREASE confidence in BTC, since a large, irresponsible player was knocked out, and the rest of the players on the field have a net higher level of responsibility (for now). [0]http://www.overstock.com/Books-Movies-Music-Games/The-Mis-Behavior-of-Markets-A-Fractal-View-of-Financial-Turbulence-Paperback/1742370/product.html?refccid=GSUOBJC4S2E3ZDKGRT73NX6FC4&searchidx=0 http://www.overstock.com/Books-Movies-Music-Games/The-Mis-Be... (I'm linking it via overstock so you can buy it with BTC - which is, hilariously, what I did)
- ryanobjc 13y agoBitcoin exchanges will have a run - they resemble fractional reserve banking, because all exchanges dont have enough USD (or other currency) to cover every bitcoin that people might want to trade thru the exchanges (that could be every single bitcoin in existence). This obviously results in the crash of the exchange rates, and probably a reduction in the usage of the currency as well. Getting paid in something that has little use of it's own doesn't help you. Now, on #3, you said "in a rational world"... But this isn't a rational world, so the rest of this sentence doesn't apply. The reality is like loss of confidence is very powerful, and it could, as the document noted, destroy BTC for the near and possibly medium term.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- OedipusRex 13y agoDid I just loose all my coins I had with them?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mintplant 13y agoProbably.
- jmomo 13y agoYour coins were gone months or even a year or two ago. You are just realizing it now. MtGox didn't realize they were missing either, until rather recently.
- camus2 13y agoThat's what they say. How can you still trust what they said?there is 0 proof there was a bug.
- georgemcbay 13y agoYes, but in return you are learning a valuable lesson, which is that "loose" spells the word that means the opposite of tight and the word you were looking for is "lose", which is the opposite of win or gain.
- Gracana 13y agoI'm impressed, how did you manage to understand what he meant?
- berberous 13y agoYes, they seem to be gone, but the leaked document [0] shows that major stakeholders plan to inject coins back in to cover losses, and to run the new Gox.com so that it's profits go to stakeholders with losses. The "Strategy Timeline" page says "50% covered", which sounds to me like the other big exchanges think that between bailout and arbitrage they can cover that amount initially, and hopefully earn the rest back over time. I could definitely be misreading the document. Take a look yourself. And of course, the best laid plans often go awry.... Sorry, by the way. That sucks big time. [0] http://www.scribd.com/doc/209050732/MtGox-Situation-Crisis-Strategy-Draft http://www.scribd.com/doc/209050732/MtGox-Situation-Crisis-S...
- pg_bot 13y agoOn the bright side, we have a new term for getting screwed: goxxed.
- bobsil1 13y agoAnd you can get both goxxed and doxxed.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Shank 13y agoAt this point, the timeline of events greatly suggests that Mt. Gox's initial announcement of withdrawal freezing was the point at which they were officially dead. If the insolvency document is true, over 700,000 bitcoin was stolen, due to a bug in their cold storage (likely, it wasn't truly cold, but automated filling a hot wallet). In the last two weeks, they were probably attempting to see if there was any way to reverse or mitigate the damage. This is the point at which they have determined that there is no 'out.' They have no where near the amount of bitcoin required to even service withdrawals. Edit: http://support.mtgox.com/ http://support.mtgox.com/ now shows that their Zendesk account has been terminated (a new account can be registered at that address).
- pwnguin 13y ago> Edit: http://support.mtgox.com/ http://support.mtgox.com/ now shows that their Zendesk account has been terminated (a new account can be registered at that address). Reregistering that Zendesk account alone has to be worth something amusing =)
- blhack 13y agoIt's really easy in all of this to pile a bunch of hatred on Mark Karpeles, but please, everybody remember that he is a human being, with real human emotions, and that those things really do hurt. -- MtGox was (past tense is probably appropriate here, but for the sake of anybody who had coins there, I hope not) a startup that failed spectacularly, and publicly, and took a TON of peoples' money with it. The transaction malleability thing was poor programming on the part of gox. Remember that we have ALL fucked up at some point, just luckily for most of us, "fucking up" doesn't mean losing than much of other peoples' money. Mark, I doubt you read hacker news, but if you do: it's alright, dude. You bastard.
- dnautics 13y agoStill, anyone who didn't think that bitcoin is incredibly risky (with a high upside) was living under a rock, There are best practicies when dealing with a risky asset such as BTC, and they're really not that hard. Speaking of which, I should probably get around to implementing those best practices myself =D
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- naiyt 13y agoYeah...the only money I've personally put into any cryptocurrency has always been with the understanding that it may either be worth nothing tomorrow or could be lost in an instant. (But I also don't store my coins in an exchange, so that helps.)
- dnautics 13y agoI just set up a complex series of recurring draws to btc to reconcile being paid weekly with paying bills monthly. This could either be really awesome or really catastrophic!
- bdc 13y agoNo, at some point between $0 and $400,000,000[1], negligence is no longer an acceptable excuse. [1] The current market value of the claimed 700k BTC loss in USD.
- anigbrowl 13y agoIn a strange way, I feel this merits the HN black bar treatment if only because of its historical import.
- newbrict 13y agoWhat is the "black bar" treatment
- ars 13y agoWhen someone prominent in the hacking community dies HN puts a black bar at the top of the page as a memorial. It's not appropriate here. A human life and money are not comparable no matter how much money.
- Istof 13y agothis isn't true, it is worth about 7 millions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life)
- wpietri 13y agoSo if we can raise $7m we can kill you? Seriously, the accounting fictions used for various economic analyses don't directly apply in the real world.
- anigbrowl 13y agoActually, they do - courts award damages for loss of life all the time, and calculating such economic loss is a basic skill of practicing tort law. A person's life is almost always infinitely valuable to the individual in question, but for everyone else it's surprisingly calculable. A gloomy business, but a necessary one all the same -life still goes on for the survivors, and at some point accountings are made and people move on.
- 13y ago
- songgao 13y agoI know little about Bitcoin (and its community) so please correct me where I'm wrong: If MtGox can publish all stolen Bitcoin, would it make it impossible for whoever with them to use them? Although Bitcoin is not regulated, stealing them still violates laws right? And since everything is kept track by the entire Bitcoin network, whoever uses it can't keep anonymous.
- lazyloop 13y agoThere's Bitcoin laundering. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mixing_service https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mixing_service
- songgao 13y agoInteresting. Is it mathematically impossible to trace back to source (and intermediate nodes) or is it just harder?
- gnerd 13y agoNot mathematically impossible just computationally infeasible, that is assuming a good implementation.
- Groxx 13y agoDone correctly, mixing N together means a strict 1/N chance of getting the source correct, and being more certain is impossible. Trivialized example: a friend and I split a single bitcoin each and send half to address A and half to address B, and we each control one address. Who owns A and who owns B? If A is used to buy something, am I the buyer or my friend? Since the private keys are generated offline, the fact that two sources sent to both A and B is all the information that exists. I've "tainted" both addresses, anyone can see that, but that's all. But even when done correctly, odds are you still expose your identity through your use of the coins in the future. So you run through a random number of mixers, and then you behave extremely carefully, since there's some taint to everything and someone could be watching any of a billion addresses for signs of you (shipment to your house, for example). Given enough connections, you can get pretty reasonable probabilities and start forming deeper and more confident paths.
- wtpiu 13y agothe api still returns information: http://data.mtgox.com/api/2/BTCUSD/money/ticker_fast?pretty http://data.mtgox.com/api/2/BTCUSD/money/ticker_fast?pretty
- moultano 13y agoI remember people getting angry whenever anyone pointed out that they were trusting a whole lot of their money to the Magic The Gathering Online Exchange.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- yogo 13y agoAh, now I get it. It's magic: now you see it, now you don't
- Lerc 13y agoAnd even now, that is not a valid criticism. There are many successful businesses who have started in fields only tangentially related to their final form. There will undoubtedly be many postmortems on what happened, but card trading will have very little impact on what happened.
- moultano 13y agoIt's not a criticism, it's a signal.
- efuquen 13y agoI think the point is that a card game has nothing to do with a currency exchange and the same sort of skills you would need for one don't translate into another. We're talking about software we want to deal with a lot of people's money, the impact of a trading card game platform making a big mistake vs a currency exchange is much much different. I think the very real criticism is you might be willing to risk having a business that isn't necessarily super organized or secure deal with trading cards but not with your money. The talent and quality I would want to hold each to are on completely different levels, and seeing someone pivot so frivolously from one to the other should really give you pause. A pivot rarely involves completely changing the type of business you're dealing with in the first place, the product might be completely different or the customers you're going after might change, but it usually is on some level related to what you started out doing. Because theoretically you're drawing on some experience or insight into the general sector you start a business in, not choosing something that you think might be cool but are not qualified to run or manage and potentially loose people (investors and consumers) a ton of money.
- pravda 13y agoFirst time I visited mtgox.com was a few hours ago. Still have it open in my browser. For the nostalgic: http://imgur.com/a/qok0O http://imgur.com/a/qok0O
- M4v3R 13y ago"Trade with confidence" ... yeah, right.
- danielweber 13y agoThey have a padlock on their screen. What more do you want?
- cjbarber 13y agoOP here. <Shameless Promo> http://www.meetup.com/Bitcoin-Engineers/ http://www.meetup.com/Bitcoin-Engineers/ This is a meetup group I created. We had our first meeting last friday. Would love to have another one this Friday - will hold it at a casual restaurant/bar on campus at Stanford. (Disclosure - although I'm a cofounder of the Stanford Bitcoin Group this group is by me and NOT the SBG). </Shameless Promo>
- MyNameIsMK 13y agoCould this be the largest documented heist of BTC in history?
- jamesaguilar 13y agoMaybe so, but the race is long.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jellicle 13y agoSo Mt. Gox has defrauded its users of half a BILLION dollars in value. And, they've put out enough misinformation that those users believe "it wuz a hax0r that did it". So no cops, no jail sentences. I believe this will go down in history as the largest fraud ever committed. If you've been following this closely and you aren't writing the book already, you're missing out.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- omni 13y ago> I believe this will go down in history as the largest fraud ever committed. Not even close. Madoff's fraud was in the tens of billions.
- jotux 13y ago>I believe this will go down in history as the largest fraud ever committed. Madoff was estimated at ~$65b, the Enron settlement was $7.1b, Lehmen folded with $600b in assets, Comp-u-card overstated income and costed investors $14b, etc. etc.
- joeblau 13y agoExactly. This is just warmup exercise compared to the pros.
- ProAm 13y agoWe'll do better next time.
- abvdasker 13y agoAccording to Wikipedia, that 65b figure is inflated. It's more likely the total amount was somewhere between 10 and 20 billion[1]. That's obviously still a ton of money. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Madoff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Madoff
- 13y ago
- flycaliguy 13y agoMy understanding is that if a majority of the miners agree, certain reversals can be made to the Bitcoin economy. Is this a situation which would benefit from such a reversal?
- keeperofdakeys 13y agoAll the transactions that go to mtgox are spread out over blocks that go back for years. It's only useful to reverse the most recent block(s). This is because blocks are made up of transactions. You can't just cherrypick them out, and each block needs the previous unchanged. You might get some more details from this http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1a51xx/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1a51xx/. It descries a fork in the blockchain that occured a while ago.
- Gracana 13y agoThey still have my 6 BTC. Oh well, it didn't really cost me anything to get those coins, and it taught me a valuable lesson about trusting a system with no customer protections.
- crawrey 13y agoTO THE MOON!
- flaxin 13y agodark side of the moon
- DrTung 13y agoMost links are still valid, like this one for their (last?) announcement: https://www.mtgox.com/img/pdf/20140220-Announcement.pdf https://www.mtgox.com/img/pdf/20140220-Announcement.pdf
- jbaudanza 13y agoThis is still better than a government bailout.
- yeukhon 13y agoHmm? We got all the money back from government bailout. Here, you lose all the money.
- EGreg 13y agoWill anyone be able to get their bitcoins from MtGox? They said the bitcoins were safe. What changed? Will they be transferred eventually? What are the chances?
- camus2 13y agoGox coins are gone,along with all the customer fiat.
- EGreg 13y agoWhat do you mean gone? What happened to the hard drives with the wallet numbers and private keys? How hard is it to transfer them via the blockchain transactions to their owners?
- camus2 13y agoLet me put this clearly : Gox customers were robbed,either by Gox itself or by a third party. There is no "transfer to the owners".
- taejo 13y ago> What happened to the hard drives with the wallet numbers and private keys? The hard drives are still there, but the wallets are empty. The coins were stolen.
- rory096 13y agoSo the OP is down, but if black hats truly made away with 700k BTC, they control some 700000/12440000 = 5.6% of existing bitcoins. If that's the case, is the original bitcoin blockchain really worth continuing?
- jliptzin 13y agoTo me this demonstrates how powerful first mover advantage can be. Gox was showing cracks in the hull (actually more like gaping holes) for months and months. People have been repeatedly warned not to touch Gox with their funds. Other, more professional (so far) exchanges popped up. Yet people very much still used Gox. Were they ignorant, lazy, or stupid? I wish everyone who lost could get their money back, but it's really hard to have sympathy here.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- zmanian 13y agoThe tendency of institutions to deny, cover up and conceal systems exploitation is one of the major failing of contemporary culture. This is how we lied ourselves into thinking that the iOS SSL stack was trustworthy and it applies equally to the Mt. Gox situation.
- joeblau 13y agoWow just watched this video of Kolin Burges from London who flew to Tokyo to find out, face to face, if he could withdraw his Bitcoins from Mt Gox. He makes an accurate prediction at the end, but this totally sucks for BTC. I was pretty optimistic about the future of it, but this is a pretty big speed bump. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob9Ak1t09Ao http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob9Ak1t09Ao
- scotty79 13y agoLast time I've lost coins with exchange (bitomat.pl) MtGox stepped in and covered the losses in full. I wonder if anyone will save my bitcoins now.
- ps4fanboy 13y agoIf they took money from depositors after they knew they were insolvent they probably broke the law.
- Eeko 13y agoSo MtGox is basically confirming, that some online criminals have accumulated at least 6% of total Bitcoin market capital? Not to count the drug dealers, cryptolockers, etc. The banksters are bad, but this kind of stuff isn't good for wider adoption. "Hey, invest in bitcoin and watch how the deflation will boost your friendly local crime empire!"
- Larrikin 13y agoSo there is alot of talk about coins being lost. I converted all my coins to litecoin a while ago, but I think I had some yen in my account. What is the likely hood of me getting that back.
- blackdogie 13y agoSo I guess the transfer out I initiated 3 weeks ago is also lost then. You live you learn I guess !
- willvarfar 13y agoHow do we know that the mgmt hasn't run away with a whole load of coin? They may really have lost a lot; they may really not be able to continue; but how do we know that they lost everything?
- terranstyler 13y agoYou guys have any idea on how to proceed if you (allegedly) have a few BTC and USD there? Yeah yeah I know, I read HN often but obviously I missed the "Stay away from Gox" posts :(
- Crito 13y agoContact a lawyer that knows something about Japan maybe? I'd say you are fucked.
- terranstyler 13y agoI agree with your take on the situation ;) Thing is that a lawyer might be throwing good money after bad, it's just ~3k and who knows, maybe the fiat claims (~50% of the 3k) are worth something (though I doubt it).
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- tjaerv 13y agoThe excellent "Blame it on Mt.Gox" music video from last spring seems rather topical again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2ku1A5Ox8U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2ku1A5Ox8U
- bartkappenburg 13y agoDid anyone have a look at the (html) source? What does this comment mean? <!-- put announce for mtgox acq here --> Maybe mtgox has been acquired by another party?
- hunvreus 13y agoJust noticed that as well; that's weird indeed. Would that mean we'd actually see it being acquired?
- chopmo 13y agoI think we're being trolled :)
- dav- 13y agoIt's gone now. Something odd I noticed, though: I was testing to see if going to https://www.mtgox.com/img/ https://www.mtgox.com/img/ would serve up a directory listing and, while it doesn't, it redirects to https://www.mtgox.com/data/mtgox_off/img/ https://www.mtgox.com/data/mtgox_off/img/ and displays a 404. If you request https://www.mtgox.com/foobar https://www.mtgox.com/foobar, it doesn't redirect but displays the same 404. If you request https://www.mtgox.com/data/mtgox_off/img/mtgox_logo_mail.png https://www.mtgox.com/data/mtgox_off/img/mtgox_logo_mail.png, it loads the image, so that's definitely a valid directory, and the shorter version (https://www.mtgox.com/img/mtgox_logo_mail.png https://www.mtgox.com/img/mtgox_logo_mail.png) is probably just being rewritten. I wonder if there's anything accessible in the / or /data dirs.
- epaga 13y agoNote the comment in the source code which just appeared: <!-- put announce for mtgox acq here -->
- gfodor 13y ago"The time to buy is when there's blood in the streets."
- mdemare 13y ago"It's always darkest just before it goes pitch black."
- skimmas 13y ago<html> <head> <title>MtGox.com</title> </head> <body> <!-- put announce for mtgox acq here --> </body> </html>
- bakhy 13y agoso, in time, bitcoin exchanges will become regulated. and in some more time, the irony might dawn on the libertarians. but on a serious note, growing pains, i guess. i am sorry for people who lost their money.
- kome 13y agoBitcoin is just a game, nobody was hurt.
- bakhy 13y agoBTW, why all this "you lost your coins" talk? if you have valid, in any way documented claims against MtGox, you should be able to sue and get some form of compensation... unfortunately, the unregulated nature of Bitcoin, the fact that the company might not have any property... ah, forget it. edit - basically, MtGox lost money. for it's users, there might be a chance to get something back.
- goxxed 13y agoHave anyone started analyzing the blockchain for these suspicious 'leaks' out of Gox? This might be one of the addresses: https://blockchain.info/address/1Drt3c8pSdrkyjuBiwVcSSixZwQtMZ3Tew https://blockchain.info/address/1Drt3c8pSdrkyjuBiwVcSSixZwQt... You can see that over the past months there has been tons of large transfers out to addresses (https://blockchain.info/address/1pnHxHzRQ1uE4rH9KtxYKhVDic2SFijno https://blockchain.info/address/1pnHxHzRQ1uE4rH9KtxYKhVDic2S...) that end up splitting up into tons of small addresses, all of which has never spent a dime. From the look of it, it seems that a huge part of the total 782,558 BTC going through the address has ended up in tiny addresses which has never spent any part of it. Are there any other plausible owners of such an account?
- o_nate 13y agoOn the other thread there was some information suggesting this might be an internal account used by another exchange.
- bgsymal 13y agoIn the page source: <!-- put announce for mtgox acq here -->
- stef25 13y agoI wonder what this comment in the source means <!-- put announce for mtgox acq here --> ?
- annnnd 13y agoProbably just a way to start a rumor that acquisition will take place.
- goatse 13y agoWE ACCIDENTALLY THE BITCOINS
- pjan 13y agoI do believe Mark Karpelès' LinkedIn Summary is due for an update: "... I have a long experience in company creation, and experienced almost any imaginable kind of trouble. Now is the time to create something that will be solid enough to handle any situation, anytime."
- lectrick 13y agoI'm sorry but the vast majority of PHP programmers are not equipped to handle running a goddamn main exchange.
- laichzeit0 13y agoWhat for me is the worst is that Mark Karpeles just rips his fucking site off the net, deletes the twitter feed and gives NO GODDAMN PUBLIC RESPONSE about any of this shit. Regardless of who's at fault, what went wrong, etc. just some simple communication would be appreciated. I seriously hope he's sleeping with one eye open. He sure as shit deserves everything that's coming to him right now. Good fucking luck if you make it out alive.
- fauria 13y agoIn the comments there are some examples of large losses due to technical or software failures: - Knight Capital Group - Mizuho Securities - HyperVM Anyone knows more cases?
- victorantos 13y agoFrankly I am surprised so many people in this community were so incredibly stupid and blind about Gox. Months and months ago when I was deciding to get into BTC I researched the exchanges and people were complaining about difficulties withdrawing from Gox. I just had this instinctive feeling that it was a big red flag and I would rather deal with a regulated albeit slow broker (Coinbase) where I can actually get my money back.
- icedchai 13y agoIf 700,000 BTC were really stolen over a long term, the people running mtgox must be complete idiots. How hard is it to occasionally add up the amount in the wallet and compare to the customer DB balances? You would think this would be done hourly (if not, at least daily) as part of sanity check / auditing process.
- jami 13y agoI bet they did occasionally check. And leaving it at, "Hm, that's weird. Oh well!" was where it went from problem to disaster.
- BtM909 13y agoAnd there's a new statement on the website: 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
- lfmb 13y agoWhat does that even mean? There is not one single oficial statement saying what they will do from now on. To me, this delay means just one thing, they screwed big time and have zero good news.
- bas 13y ago"We will be closely monitoring the situation and will react accordingly." No doubt written from an undisclosed beach.
- obimod 13y agoThis kind of reminds me of the Diablo 1 duping scheme, well at least my layman understanding of the duping flaw.
- captainchaos 13y agoOk, at the risk of sounding completely naive... I've been following this story for a while, and it seems that no one can say for sure if this is embezzlement or gross incompetence. Based on leaked memos it seems to be most people are learning towards the latter, but I'm curious if there's any evidence either way. Based on the claimed transparency of Bitcoin, I would have expected embezzlement on this scale to have been noticed earlier, or at the very least have people be able to follow the Bitcoin trail to determine what is actually happening. Am I wrong or just missing something?
- whatever1029 13y agoEveryone on this thread is being way too nice about this guy. He deserves to go to jail for a very long time. He knowingly took money from people even after problems were discovered, and said nothing about it. And after the implosion he has still not fessed up to the truth! He deserves what he gets. I'm sure a movie will be made about this debacle st some stage in the future, but this chap doesn't get to become a motivational speaker in the end.