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Mt. Gox Knew It Was Selling Phantom Bitcoin 2 Weeks Before Collapse
An anonymous reader writes "Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles wrote in a sworn declaration in the company's U.S. bankruptcy filing he suspected hundreds of thousands of bitcoins were missing on Feb. 7, more than two weeks before it finally halted trading. That means Mt. Gox allowed its customers to continue trading, knowing that its bitcoin stash was wiped out and collecting as much as US$900,000 in trading fees. Since Mt. Gox said it was also missing $27.3 million in cash from customer deposits, it raises the possibility that customers — despite seeing a cash balance displayed in their account — might have actually been buying bitcoins that did not exist, with cash that was already long gone."
I'm all for what bitcoin is trying to achieve. But this is just a news story about an exchange which didn't know what it was doing, trading in a currency that hasn't been fully proven, operating in an unknown capacity from somewhere in Japan, and without any oversight at all. That's like millions of people asking my buddy Joe who lives in a trailer to hang onto their money for them. Oh no, bad decisions were made?
I do not see why there are still people out there who keep saying Bitcoin is a good investment. We keep seeing these exchanges fold up and run off with all this money. I know they claimed they were hacked, but how do we know for sure. To me the whole Bitcoin thing is just a way for a few to get rich by ripping off so many others. Also no one should be surprised that they were sold phantom Bitcoins. You have no way of knowing what you actually have on a site like that since you can’t directly access the wallet. It seems like common sense to me, but I guess I will never understand this kind of thing.
It's official. The name is now changed to MtGotchya.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
The only people who make money in a pyramid scheme are the people at the very top. Everyone else is a sucker.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I'm thinking of a word for a kind of system where, I don't know, someone makes rules for how large chunks of assets are managed, traded, stored. This word would mean that some PEOPLE, some kind of official-sounding types of PEOPLE, would "check up" on these places, these places that handle and store and manage other people's money, or assets, stuff. They would be checking up to make sure that the people who run those places, those people, wouldn't be, knowingly or unknowingly, doing things with other people's money that they shouldn't be doing. Maybe there could be a kind of system, say, where those people doing those things, are encouraged or made to do some things, to prove, that they have the money and things that they are supposed to have, and doing the things, those things that they are supposed to do, and not doing those things that they are not supposed to be doing, to those other people's money, and assets and stuff. And that they're honest, about what they say that they're doing, and that they're not doing. Who would be doing all that checking, and what would that process be, and who would be subject to it. If only there were one simple word for all of that.
Gold is not hard currency. That term really should really only apply to diamonds.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Isn't the bitcoin protocol expected to prevent exactly this? Assuming that the cryptographic part wasn't broken, the existence of a 6-block chain telling you the coins are there means they *are* there. Something tells me that a lot of people blindly trusted some random guy on the internet with their money instead of simply validating the fckn block chain, which would have told them immediately that they were screwed over.
Neoliberals? I'm under the impression that Libertarians with the minds of teenagers are the ones so in love with Bitcoin, and opposed to regulation that would normally keep their money safe.
That all depends on how one prefers to be robbed. The transparent, libertarian way is to have your money stolen in front of you. The opaque, governmental way is to have it stolen in 3% to 5% increments every year via government-mandated inflation.
Except banks have multiple layers of safety nets to cover depositors and investors if things go bad.
Climbing a mountain with and without a rope are identical most of the time, but the difference is very important under certain conditions.
Though, with the likes of Overstock accepting BTC now, the marketplace itself might soon serve that function without needing an external point of reference.
Why is this lie perpetually getting repeated? Hell, some moron even modded it up. Overstock (and Tigerdirect, etc) do not accept bitcoins as payment.
Once again for those of you too stupid to read carefully - No major retailer accepts bitcoins as tender!. Some of them allow you to pay via an exchange such as coinbase, but note that even though the customer is parting with bitcoins, the seller is only ever receiving dollars (AKA real currency).
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.