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New message from Mt. Gox
- taybin 13y agoThat's it??
- ekianjo 13y agoYeah, kinda disappointing. That's a company which does not care a bit about their users...
- _pmf_ 13y ago> That's a company which does not care a bit about their users... Yes, but they cared about their user's bits.
- broolstoryco 13y agowhat did you expect, bitcoins?
- empgodot 13y agoyup.
- lettergram 13y agoI don't understand why people put their money/BitCoins in MtGox, if you researched them (previous to this incident) you would find a large number of complaints and shady dealings. Personally, I put my coins in BTC-e, Virtuex, and CoinBase (and thank god I did). Even though BTC-e and Virtuex seemed fairly sketchy they still allowed me to withdrawal my coins with no issue.
- jliptzin 13y agoWhy not set up a secure offline wallet and keep your coins there?
- gulbrandr 13y ago> recent news reports Of which recent news reports are they talking about?
- shawabawa3 13y agoI'm guessing that gox lost ~$400m and is insolvent? Perhaps the leak was fake, so gox shut down to prevent people panic selling
- ryanburk 13y agoprobably this: http://blog.coinbase.com/post/77766809700/joint-statement-regarding-mtgox http://blog.coinbase.com/post/77766809700/joint-statement-re...
- negamax 13y agoSeems like they concluded that panic selling is over and they can't benefit from this anymore? Too bad many of their customers already sold at much lower prices.
- donquichotte 13y agoThe current message means absolutely nothing: "Dear MtGox Customers, In the event of recent news reports and the potential repercussions on MtGox's operations and the market, a decision was taken to close all transactions for the time being in order to protect the site and our users. We will be closely monitoring the situation and will react accordingly. Best regards, MtGox Team"
- reedlaw 13y agoSounds very passive. "Closely monitoring"? "React accordingly"? As if they were not the ones running the site.
- mpclark 13y agoDon't forget "a decision was taken"...
- dblacc 13y agoWords chosen very carefully in an attempt to keep everyone calm..
- madaxe_again 13y agoWords chosen very carefully that potentially hold a subtext. Are they hinting at a security service takedown and gag? MtGox would be a potential target if, say, someone wanted all the data to do a statistical analysis and tie MtGox accounts to SR accounts. Way out there, but it's anyone's guess right now, and I thought I'd throw this hat in the ring.
- ProAm 13y ago"React Accordingly" can still mean freak the 'f' out.
- computer 13y agoIt actually made me laugh out loud. The statement makes it seem like MtGox was all fine and dandy until media started to talk about its shutdown. And now they say: > We will be closely monitoring the situation and will react accordingly. As if they're just sitting back, staring at their screen, waiting to see what will happen. Passively.
- denzquix 13y agoAnd it doesn't seem to have been proofread very well. "In the event of [something that has already happened]..."? I don't consider myself a particularly picky person, but come on, you could at least make the effort at a time like this.
- malka 13y agoI would not like to be in the shoes of mtgox CEO... He lost about 400M USD, some of them probably belonging to shady peoples (drug dealer, mobs, etc.)
- kyleblarson 13y agoGiven their physical office location I wonder if any Yakuza have(had) any BTC in MtGOX. That could get interesting.
- davidw 13y agoThose kinds of guys don't seem like the type to trade cash, which they know well, for magical internet money that they know nothing about.
- gwern 13y agoThe Yakuza have been moving into white-collar and financial crime for decades, and Japan has had cellphone-related quasi-currencies for a long time now. It's not that big a stretch.
- saraid216 13y agoUh. If I was in organized crime and I heard that Bitcoin was a great way to do money laundering, I'd make sure I knew about it. That's half the point of organizing crime to begin with.
- icelancer 13y agoHow do you know a highly organized unit of crime is technologically illiterate?
- davidw 13y agoWell, the local bunch are certainly not all that sharp from that point of view. "In April 2006, fugitive Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano was captured in Sicily partly because some of his messages, written in a variation of the Caesar cipher, were broken. Provenzano's cipher used numbers, so that "A" would be written as "4", "B" as "5", and so on.[11]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_cipher http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_cipher And this wasn't just some bozo, but a Mafia boss who was certainly into a lot of different "lines of business": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardo_Provenzano http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardo_Provenzano
- shawabawa3 13y agoI guess this could be taken to mean "the leak was a fake and unanticipated, we closed the markets to prevent even more panic selling" Maybe there is a faint glimmer of hope for gox... (I personally doubt it)
- alexchamberlain 13y agoSo I have n bitcoins and $x in MtGox; will I get this back? Will there be a haircut? Is MtGox winding down? So many questions...
- Ellipsis753 13y agoRight now it seems likely that the answer is "no". Although who knows...
- mariusz79 13y agoNo
- k-mcgrady 13y agoIf there was a chance they could fix this they wouldn't have posted a completely meaningless bullshit message. My guess is that they know it's over, are consulting with lawyers, and are trying to cover their own asses. Being honest would probably hurt them at this stage.
- mcdougle 13y agoI'm curious about the $x. Seems like getting bitcoins out if it has gone out the window, but since fiat is regulated, wouldn't they be legally required to pay out any fiat their customers have in the system? I didn't have bitcoins in the system, but I did have a couple hundred dollars. Completely negligible amount and it doesn't really affect me to lose it, but it would be convenient to get it back.
- TophWells 13y agoProbably not. But don't give up hope yet.
- astrodust 13y agoGive up hope. This thing is toast.
- bloaf 13y agoThey will be returning all their miner's CPU cycles.
- antonwinter 13y agoTheir way of protecting the site and the users is doing precisely the opposite
- 650REDHAIR 13y agoAre you kidding me? This message is likely worse than staying silent.
- ctdonath 13y agoSilent would be worse. At least we know that the site is deliberately disabled by its owners, as opposed to a host of other hypotheticals we'd be discussing otherwise.
- 650REDHAIR 13y agoNo. Because this shows that they aren't using some sort of professional crisis management team and are trying to handle it in house. That's ridiculous. They keep showing themselves incapable of handling such a high profile company.
- yebyen 13y agoDo they have to hire a team if someone with deeper pockets just came in and said "Shut it down, we're buying you out"? You may be right that they are incompetent and it shows, but it doesn't necessarily follow that the answer is to right now immediately hire a new team and let them handle it.
- bigje54 13y agoBut is that really any better? Instead of not trusting hackers/outside entities, you have to deal with not being able to trust the site/company creators. I'd call that worse than staying silent. This statement inspires absolutely zero confidence and trust at a time when both those things are necessary at some level.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- nhangen 13y agoIs this a joke? What's worse than a non-response? Lies. That's what.
- fennecfoxen 13y agoCONSPIRACY THEORY TIME. What if Mt. Gox didn't really lose a post-Panamax boatload of Bitcoin (just a small amount)? They're just manufacturing a panic so they can buy Bitcoins at fire-sale prices, declare "We have all the BitCoin we need after all, we fixed our bug, everything's fiiiine" and maybe even turn a cash profit on the upside? </conspiracy theory, assumes a modicum of competence, etc>
- swombat 13y agoIf there was any evidence of that they'd go to jail for a long time - even if bitcoin is not directly regulated, I'm sure there are still some anti-fraud regulations that would kick in...
- wpietri 13y agoWhich statement do you think is fraudulent? They could actually have lost the bitcoins. They could be still having technical problems. Fennecfoxen's theory could be illegal market manipulation, but I wouldn't be surprised if the BTC market is weird enough that it doesn't fit under the laws against that. Or at least that it'd be such a mess to prosecute that prosecutors would all find something better for their careers to do.
- dagw 13y agoFennecfoxen's theory could be illegal market manipulation Market manipulation in general isn't illegal, so it would basically boil down to if the SEC considered BTC a currency or not.
- kome 13y ago> I'm sure there are still some anti-fraud regulations that would kick in... I don't know, but I don't think so. For the law you may be trading in monopoly money at your risk.
- VLM 13y agoIntentional misrepresentation of fact for material gain doesn't seem to require currency of any sort. So Kome I'll make you a deal, I've got a ownership title for the Brooklyn Bridge and I'll trade this title to you for a case of beer... deal? Deal. Sucka. Then it goes to court. Assuming you can convince the court I knew the title was fake, and the case of beer is worth more than the fake title (maybe the title has artistic merit, or maybe the beer was worthless American Lite "beer" of negative worth) then its pretty cut and dried as fraud.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- EarthLaunch 13y agoI think they might be manipulating the market. Here's my translation: "Because people discovered that we lost or stole money, and that would destroy our operations, someone who doesn't want to be responsible for making a decision decided that we could try causing a market crash by dramatically wiping our accounts, lowering the price enough that we could buy our way back to solvency. It didn't entirely work, so we're making this announcement, which is also meant to lower the price, or if that doesn't work, allow us to segue back into operations. We will be monitoring the Bitcoin price and will react accordingly."
- o_nate 13y agoBest case speculation: they really are being acquired by a more competent exchange, or consortium of competent exchanges, who decided to step in to prevent further harm to Bitcoin's reputation. Hence the hidden message in the html, the acquisition of the "gox.com" domain, and the suspending of all transactions until the official announcement.
- clauretano 13y agohidden message in the HTML? Nothing as of right now http://pastebin.com/yi5j88FG http://pastebin.com/yi5j88FG
- mcdougle 13y agoHe's probably talking about earlier, when there was an HTML comment about an acquisition
- haakon 13y agoIf someone competent want to start an exchange, why would they pay to be associated with the MtGox brand? After all of this, that brand must be poisonous.
- Udo 13y agoI'm one of those who lost a good amount on MtGox. It wasn't in there because I thought they are a bank, I put it there because I like to speculate from time to time. As such I was prepared to lose most if not all of it anyway. I didn't expect things to go wrong so thoroughly, but still that was the premise of my deposits there. So from that perspective, I'm not really mad about them losing the money. It's unfortunate, it even really sucks, but shit happens. Sometimes that shit is an apocalyptic event. What makes me angry though is their utter failure to communicate, to admit what happened. I feel like they're taunting their ex customers, or at the very least they don't give a crap about anything at all. That's what's really off-putting, and that's what breeds speculation about them being the ones who perpetrated the theft in the first place (which I personally don't believe). Instead what we see here is an absolute non-message from them. It's like this Seinfeld episode with the shirt at the dry cleaners. We know they shrunk it, they know they shrunk it, so they should just come right out and admit "we shrunk it"!
- ck2 13y agoI guess I am naive but I always thought Japan would actually have stricter regulations and penalties for businesses that do this kind of thing, relative to the US.
- pjc50 13y agoThey might .. but enforcement is hardly automatic and tends to be slow. They might already be investigating.
- hga 13y agoExactly. The US has a pretty good, as these things go, food protection regime. But it hardly mattered when Peanut Corporation of America (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanut_Corporation_of_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peanut_Corporation_of_America) set up a factory in Texas and never informed any of the authorities so it could be regulated. (That wasn't the only facility that was rotten, but the one the regulators never had a chance to fail in dealing with.)
- 13y ago
- sneak 13y agoWhen has the passive voice ever actually worked to calm a lynch mob?
- rch 13y agoWhen the speaker exists as a virtual office in another country. It reminds me of something out of Heinlein's Friday.
- TillE 13y agoI'm getting a little tired of every (justifiably!) angry group of people being called a "lynch mob" by default on the internet. You might want to wait for something resembling actual violence before applying such an ugly characterization. A bunch of people saying mean things is not a "lynch mob".
- sneak 13y agoThere are literally dozens of people on reddit's /r/bitcoin right now casually discussing contract killings, with various shades of joking (from "kinda" to "not at all"). I'm not being hyperbolic.
- goldilox 13y agoIsn't that the kind of shit bitcoin was made for? Drugs/contract killings in the "deep web"? Would not surprise me at all if some of those guys are serious, especially if they just lost their life savings.
- danielweber 13y agoThis reminds me of corporate announcements that say "for your convenience" just before saying something incredibly inconvenient. "For your convenience, all your Bitcoins have been deleted."
- sanbor 13y agoHere in Argentina the government does this all the time. For example, Today they have announced that Nic.ar, the entity that handles .com.ar domains, will start to charge 200 $AR to register a domain. And the guy that made the announcement said "The users were asking for this from long time" (yes, of course, users are asking to pay for something that is free). Source http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lanacion.com.ar%2F1666972-comenzaran-a-cobrar-por-registrar-dominios-comar&act=url http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&pre...
- klzns 13y agoIf it's free, how do you discourage people from registrering a domain just for speculation? Paying for it is a good way.
- amvp 13y agowww.gox.com is now redirecting to mtgox.com. For an organisation which is insolvent they must have invested a fairly significant sum on a 3 letter .com domain. This happened yesterday! What's going on here?
- bdcravens 13y agoInsolvent != no money in the bank
- amvp 13y agoYeah, but shouldn't they try to pay people back before they spend what's likely tens of thousands of dollars on what amounts to superficial marketing? I mean, it's not even much of a re-brand!
- dragonwriter 13y ago> Yeah, but shouldn't they try to pay people back before they spend what's likely tens of thousands of dollars on what amounts to superficial marketing? "Should" based on the assumption that they are profit-maximizing entity, or "should" based on the assumption that they are a moral actor? Because, you know, the answers are quite different.
- SilasX 13y agoI think that "should" is based on "wanting to avoid prosecution for operating while insolvent".
- TophWells 13y agoIt's fertile breeding grounds for conspiracy theories, so I'm not going to post my elaborate speculation here. I'll just summarise it as "there are several people working at Mt. Gox and they're probably not very good at talking to one another".
- H4U 13y agoThey SHOULD pay secured creditors which could include domain provider. I dont imagine its customers are SECURED .. so will be last .. in a proper insolvency..
- jorisw 13y agoWhat are they doing in the page source there? Storing a message in a cookie then refreshing the page to display it? The second time you visit the page, you'll get your cookie-stored statement. Almost seems like they want to be able to change their statement without previous visitors seeing the changes.
- TophWells 13y agoI don't see anything like that. Here's the page source for me: <html> <head> <title>MtGox.com</title> </head> <body> <p><img src="/img/mtgox_logo_mail.png"/></p> <p>Dear MtGox Customers,</p> <p>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.</p> <p>Best regards,<br/> MtGox Team</p> </body> </html>
- TophWells 13y agoWait, I refreshed the page a few times, and once, I got: <html> <head> <title>MtGox.com</title> <script type="text/javascript"> var AKSB=AKSB||{};AKSB.q=[];AKSB.mark=function(b,a){AKSB.q.push(["mark",b,a||(new Date).getTime()])};AKSB.measure=function(b,a,c){AKSB.q.push(["measure",b,a,c||(new Date).getTime()])};AKSB.done=function(b){AKSB.q.push(["done",b])};AKSB.mark("firstbyte",(new Date).getTime()); AKSB.prof={custid:"223233",ustr:"",originlat:0,clientrtt:19,ghostip:"23.51.248.44",ipv6:false,pct:10,xhrtest:false,clientip:"130.223.174.194"}; (function(b){var a=document.createElement("iframe");a.src="javascript:false";(a.frameElement||a).style.cssText="width: 0; height: 0; border: 0; display: none";var c=document.getElementsByTagName("script"),c=c[c.length-1];c.parentNode.insertBefore(a,c);a=a.contentWindow.document;a.open().write("<body onload=\"var js = document.createElement('script');js.id = 'aksb-ifr';js.src = '"+b+"';document.body.appendChild(js);\">");a.close()})(("https:"===document.location.protocol?"https:":"http:")+"//aksb-a.akamaihd.net/146060/aksb-a/aksb.min.js"); </script> </head> <body> <p><img src="/img/mtgox_logo_mail.png"/></p> <p>Dear MtGox Customers,</p> <p>In light of recent news reports and the potential repercussions on MtGox's operations and the market, a decision was taken to close all transactions for the time being in order to protect the site and our users. We will be closely monitoring the situation and will react accordingly.</p> <p>Best regards,<br/> MtGox Team</p> </body> </html> This is very odd behaviour.
- postscapes1 13y agoThey are just trolling everyone now...
- tibbon 13y agoWell putting together that statement clearly took a lot of work...
- biot 13y agoSometimes it seems like Mt.Gox is a corporation in EVE Online. Like in EVE, they're trading in virtual goods and there's zero regulation. Similarly, scams are part of the game.
- rasz_pl 13y agoPlaying EVE Online taught me to spot scams, pyramids and ponzi schemes in an instant. When I first read about bitcoin I couldnt stop laughing, "people really pay for pretend money counting on price going up so they can sell and earn $? AHAHAHA" was all I could hear in my head. Turns out I was too smart for my own good. Almost every ponzi scheme can be exploited _if_ you get on board early enough. At the current stage of bitcoin only suckers are left holding the bag. Of course no one will see it, because "Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)" (its a book, read it).
- lutusp 13y ago> Turns out I was too smart for my own good. Almost every ponzi scheme can be exploited ... You're misusing the term "Ponzi scheme". A speculative system that relies on volatility and wishful thinking isn't necessarily a Ponzi scheme (might be but not necessarily). A classic Ponzi scheme has layers or levels that are treated differently. Ordinary speculation about a volatile entity doesn't have this property. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme Quote: "Typically, extraordinary returns are promised on the original investment[5] and vague verbal constructions such as "hedge futures trading", "high-yield investment programs", or "offshore investment" might be used. The promoter sells shares to investors by taking advantage of a lack of investor knowledge or competence, or using claims of a proprietary investment strategy which must be kept secret to ensure a competitive edge."
- tjaerv 13y agohttp://www.coindesk.com/mt-gox-statement-claims-made-conscious-decision-halt-transactions/ http://www.coindesk.com/mt-gox-statement-claims-made-conscio...
- RankingMember 13y agoSo at this point, what exchange should someone who has, say, a ton of LTC, go to convert their holdings to Dogecoin?
- rasz_pl 13y agoCognitive dissonance is strong with you my child (or irony, in which case I failed at detecting it).
- fiatjaf 13y agoIf Bitcoin were a government currency, all Bitcoin users would have to pay for MtGox losses and every MtGox users would get their money back. That's the price of anarchism.
- NigelTufnel 13y agoThis is insane. No <!doctype> declaration? Come on!