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Mt. Gox Shuts Down: Collapse Should Come As No Surprise
New submitter Dan541 writes in with word that Mt. Gox has halted all operations indefinitely. A statement from the CEO: "As there is a lot of speculation regarding MtGox and its future, I would like to use this opportunity to reassure everyone that I am still in Japan, and working very hard with the support of different parties to find a solution to our recent issues. ... 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."
MrBingoBoingo writes that we should not be surprised Mt. Gox appears to have failed "The recent closure of the famous Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox has grabbed a lot of media attention lately, but people involved heavily in bitcoin have been raising alarms about business practices at Mt. Gox for quite some time now. With the Mt. Gox failure being Bitcoin's biggest since the collapse of the ponzi run by Trendon Shavers, also known as Pirateat40, it might be time to revisit the idea of counterparty risk in the world of irreversible cryptocurrency."
If you can answer that question, then it says something about the usefulness of bitcoin without MtGox.
Yeah MtGox was big, and this will almost certainly cause bitcoin to take a slide, but there are other exchanges, and Bitcoin is bigger than just MtGox. My prediction: bitcoin will drop a lot, then slowly recover as other exchanges take the load and people see that this is not, in fact, the end of the world.
Hopefully the ones that replace MtGox will have better tech.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Risk? In a commodity that has regular 2x and 0.5x value swings in a single day? Say it isn't so!
Let's say you deposit your retirement money at the Bonnie and Clyde savings and loan. They then take that money and move to Mexico and use it for their retirement. They may or may not use a car to get there. Either way, you're never going to see that money again.
I don't understand Bitcoins in general, but I *really* don't understand the process where they could be stolen. Could someone please explain it? Car analogies OK.
Just about any scenario where money is held as cash or a deposit in a bank account could apply equally to Bitcoin. You give a stack of $100 bills to a bank, they give you a slip of paper showing they have your money and will give it back when you ask. If the bank president or a crooked teller then puts everyone's stacks of $100 bills in a suitcase and disappears, your slip of paper isn't worth much.
In the case of the Pirateat40, it was a classic Ponzi scheme. The fact that it was done with Bitcoins instead of pieces of paper with pictures of dead Presidents and statesmen on them doesn't change much.
It would have been fine if they'd kept it in their mattresses, but instead they gave it all to a guy who used to manage Magic The Gathering card swaps.
Ether it was deliberate theft on part of MTGOX that was done to effectively make a ponzi scheme. It could have been a theft from unrelated parties, and MTGOX lied to effectively create a ponzi scheme to hide the damage. Or, somehow, it was theft from unrelated parties, and MTGOX was blissfully unaware until it all came crashing down.
For a simplistic explanation, think of Bitcoins as golden coins. You can own gold coins/bitcoins physically (keep gold coin in your pocket or keep BTC private keys in your posession). You can also relinquish your gold coin to the bank and have a bank note stating that they owe you a gold coin. In terms of Bitcoin, MtGox acted as a de-facto bank, where BTC owners gave away (or transfered) BTC to Mt Gox and had a false sense of security that their assets were "there". MtGox victims basically entrusted their private key to the third party (MtGox). Now, let's assume, the bank who kept gold was robbed, by someone who dig to the vaults and silently removed gold. The bank kept telling you that, according to their records, you still are the owner of the gold, while in reality they would not be in position to repay you. MtGox did the same thing: their real assets were stolen, while their "paper" records were showing existence of the BTC. This is a simplistic explanation, but, to be sure gold/bitcoins did not just disappear. They only sit in the possession of other owners.
There was a bug in the code whereby you could get MtGox to send out your bitcoins to your address, but rebroadcast the transaction under a different transaction ID. This mean when MtGox checked to see if their transaction worked, it looked like it hadn't (since the transaction ID didn't match.) They then re-sent you the bitcoins you already had received, giving you twice as much as they should have.
Apparently the bug has been there for years.
It's like getting a cheque, and changing the cheque number from 123 to 124. The new cheque still looks valid so it cashes fine, but you go back to the sender and complain you never got a cheque. They see cheque 123 was never cashed, and so write you a new one. You cash that one as well. At some point they should notice that they've paid out twice as much as they should have, but for MtGox they didn't notice this for a long time.
Mt. Gox is presenting it as a theft by an entity outside of Mt. Gox.
The question is whether you trust Mt. Gox enough to believe that. Other possibilities are:
1. Someone at Mt. Gox stole the money
2. Mt. Gox itself was just a confidence trick designed to steal peoples' money.
3. Mt. Gox was a Ponzi scheme that is now unraveling.
4. Mt. Gox was essentially a legitimate bank, but was run too incompetently to maintain solvency in the face of market fluctuations, and they're now lying to cover up their incompetence.
5. Even the people at Mt. Gox don't know what's going on and have self-servingly decided on an explanation that puts the blame on someone else.
I'm sure there are more options.
I don't understand Bitcoins in general, but I *really* don't understand the process where they could be stolen. Could someone please explain it? Car analogies OK.
A car analogy? Sure. You're a classic car collector. Because storing and securing your classic cars is such a pain, you decide to entrust them to a business that is fairly well known and respected in the hobby. This business, for a modest fee, says they will keep your classic cars in a secure garage, and also let you sell them to other collectors who are customers of the same service without having to physically move them.
For a while all this works OK. People deposit their cars for safekeeping, they withdraw their cars, they trade them, everything is fine. A few mix-ups and glitches, but nothing out of the ordinary for a business of this size. Then at some point there's a "security problem" that keeps people from taking their cars back. The business says it's because of some kind of flaw in the software they use to track them, but they're working on getting it fixed. They give a date. The date comes and goes, and people still can't get their cars back. The CEO of the company gives excuses – he can't talk about what actually happened, but he promises everything will be OK if the collectors just give him a bit more time. There are complicated issues, but no, your cars haven't been stolen, pinky swear!
Eventually a hobbyist organization that this CEO is a member of decides to kick him out, and puts out an announcement saying that his company is insolvent – as everyone suspected for some time now, he doesn't have the cars he was supposed to be keeping in safe storage for his customers. No one knows where they went, who has them now, or if the theft was internal or external.
And because this company was holding ~6% of all the classic cars in existence, it's kind of a big deal.
To play Bitcoin, you have to trust your Bitcoin exchanges. Those are BANKS, people. UNREGULATED banks!!! Banks have a history of really screwing depositors over when they're unregulated. Bank panics?? Why we have the FDIC?? Think about this for half a fucking second.
How do you know where "your" Bitcoins are right now?
One of the benefits of money is that it's backed up by a social superstructure (police, judiciary, the army, etc.). Bitcoin has none of that. You are on your own.
As far as I understood, the Mt. Gox' API had a hole, which allowed customers to withdraw money without it showing up in Mt. Gox's books. Some customers noticed, and overdid it so much that no money was left to honour the other (honest) customers' accounts.
You are a car rental agency and your customer comes to get the car they reserved. The customer pays and drives off with the car. They return immediately afterward and says they haven't picked up the car yet. Because of a deficiency in the paperwork, the checkout person doesn't realize that a car has already been provided but sees that its paid for and provides a second car. Turns out the customer has used a false identity and can also reissue VIN numbers and now has two cars for the price of one. You look out in the parking lot the next day and realize all your cars are gone and you only have half the money. Crap. Somebody had the nerve to take advantage of a problem in your paperwork system that has been publicly known for a couple years but you have been too lazy and irresponsible to correct.
Its pretty obvious that getting the transaction process fixed is the solution. All the exchanges have or are in the process of doing this. Its too late for Mt. Gox. They and their customers are screwed unless they can come up with a way to trace the funds through a byzantine scheme to mix and anonymize and retract the transactions. Building a warp drive star ship would likely be simpler...
Greed is the root of all evil.
The feeling on reddit and bitcointalk is that it was due to unbelievable incompetence by MtGox and not an inside job. They wrote their withdrawal code to throw money away over and over and they didn't audit their accounts for years. They also lied to cover up their losses for maybe a couple of years.
They simply had no understanding of the technology they were using.
So given that bitcoin transactions are all known why can't they trace a suffient number of these back to wither a source or to nullify the recipient's income?
that is even if the person doing it hid there tracks at some point they would have transacted those bit coins, possibly to some third party (e.g. to convert them to dollars or buy a pony). Or they might have transmitted them into some combined tumbler to anonymize the trail. But with real currency if I rob a bank and buy a car with the money the money can be seized from the car dealer if the cops so decide. With bit coin there's no mechanism to do that. The whole bitcoin ecosystem would have to agree to the seizure to unwind the transaction trail. It would also require a lot of new non-trivial calculations to do that back multiple years.
But in principle these transactions are at least tracebale. Perhaps the problem is it's international and Mt GOx doesn't have the resources to trace this?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Nice analogy... if you want a real world example of this happening, consider the storage facilities for fine wine in Manhattan-- flooded during hurricane Sandy
For (largely unexplained) reasons the storage facilities still won't allow the customers access to (or even look at) the wine they're supposedly storing...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12...