You can't trust much in this particular corner of the internet.
Through these giant waves of expansion, they've kept their trade engine running quickly (people have described a few brief periods of slower operation, but it never affected me).
A lot of folks discount them because they're in Eastern/Central Europe, but really Slovenia's business environment shares more with Germany than it does the rest of Eastern Europe.
All in all, I think Bitstamp is doing a great job.
Checked with the team and we couldn't find any interaction matching that description. http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1wtbiu/how_i_stole_...
We work with a community of security researchers who help us test these sort of things https://coinbase.com/whitehat including quite a lot on race conditions. We use a variety of datastores for different parts of the app where they are best suited.
Some people view this as a problem, personally I view this as a benefit. Because of them being a little bit sketchy, they don't ask for ID verification and offer some services, margin trading for example that other exchanges do not due to legal complications. As long as you use it as an exchange and not as storage I think it's perfectly fine.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1wtbiu/how_i_stole_...
Why is MongoDB bad? It's not ACID compliant. It's hard to determine the state of the database with concurrent processes attempting to modify its data. Given the explanation it's fairly clear that it's Coinbase being talked about.
That being said, I don't think a schemaless database is really appropriate for carefully considered (or what should be carefully considered) financial data.
Trust is a slow process.
There is also the huge problem that they do not have MSB licenses in the US, so it's only a matter of time until Florida or NY sues them, or demands the arrest and extradition of the owners for not complying with US laws yet still allowing American customers.
These exchanges have to have a certain amount of capital set aside and can't simply disappear with account holder's money if they get hacked due to incompetence.
If people lose all confidence in Gox, but still retain faith in other exchanges, then that means we're going to witness MtGox's price drop while the other exchanges' prices rise. However, this becomes an economic opportunity for anyone who wants to do arbitrage between exchanges. Therefore it seems like the prices won't ever diverge too much.
The conclusion, it seems, is that no matter how bad one exchange is, it will simply drag the overall price of Bitcoin down across all exchanges rather than suffer punishment as an individual company. The fact that arbitrage is doable seems to give MtGox some insulation from consumer outrage.
This poses a question: Is it true that as long as an exchange keeps functioning, then it's "here to stay" no matter how badly they behave? Is there any way that an exchange could go out of business from nothing more than consumers losing faith that one exchange?
Coinbase isn't an exchange. They are a dealer. When you buy or sell on Coinbase your are interacting directly with Coinbase. You trade with them at their discretion. There is even some jargon about Coinbase being able to "cancel or reverse potentially high-risk buys or sells of bitcoin", though it isn't clear what high-risk means from the context. See section 3 of their user agreement.
Prior to that, i'd buy some coins and they'd wait until the price dropped quite a bit to "complete the transaction." And i'd contact them again and again and it would take them a week to get back to me as the transaction was pending.
No, and that's evident by the fact that Mt.Gox has been losing market share steadily since their withdrawal problems started. People are leaving Mt.Gox but at a very slow rate because there is a limit of outgoing transfers like 100-200K EUR/day so at most they lose something like 6M worth of deposits every month. If they solve the withdrawal problems right now I'm pretty sure people will forget about all the issues over the years and will happily trade at MtGox again. But if the problems continue for 1 more year, I think Gox will be pretty much dead.
Realistically, Mt. Gox have said they won't allow withdrawals indefinitely. They know that fixing this issue — known since 2011 — is going to take time. It's already been 3 years with no fix.
This is their get out of jail free card, giving them as much time as possible to work on whatever they need to do to get things back to normal... if they even want to.
</snark>
You'd rather place the process in the hands of people no more competent or interested than those already involved? and do so by threat of force?
Either way, MtGox has been consistently out of line with market price, in a market with plenty of arbitraging, indicating that they have problems and people know it.
I don't know how to get easy numbers on exchange volume over time, but I do know that Mt Gox has fallen from the obvious top exchange to a solid third over the time I've paid attention (maybe half a year.) Why they still have any decent volume, I don't know; inertia, people still cashing out or waiting for Mt Gox to improve, suckers lured by the arbitrage opportunity, perhaps the Japanese domestic market (they're the only Yen exchange). I know I wouldn't touch the place with a 29.5 foot pole.
However, in reality there are huge obstacles to moving fiat money around and the market is simply not allowed to improve liquidity how it desires.
> "...rather than their own bottom line."
Cannot the bit coin protocol be used by end users with full features without a third party "wallet" service ?
Are these services purely for people that don't understand files and encryption utilities ?
I do not use bitcoin, but if I did, I assume I would just protect and back up those computer files like many other extremely valuable computer files I have.
What am I missing here ?
There are also end-user applications like Armory, which are meant to manage and secure a wallet on an end-user's machine, but its inevitable that people will use online services for foreseeable future.
The Bitcoin team did push out a change in 8 hours once for a critical signed/unsigned bug that threatened the whole system [3], but this problem looks to me like NOTABUG/WONTFIX. The transaction malleability is an annoyance, not a real bug. Basically the support team just needs to spend an extra 5 seconds checking a transaction instead of blindly issuing refunds.
My recent article [2] goes into the Bitcoin protocol in great detail if you want to know more about transaction signing, which should help explain technically what is going on with malleability.
Is this an excuse for Mt Gox to withhold coins? Absolutely not. Who knows whether they are giving a big fuck you to the bitcoin community, now that there's little left to lose, or whether they've lost or outright stolen the coins.
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/2131
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/3637
But whats more important is that this malleability stuff is not very much related to fraud risk, I explained more here: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=319565...
Sooo how does it do it? How does it determine a unique transaction id?
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1x93tf/some_irc_cha...
They didn't discover anything - they were warned, quite some time ago, that they were not correctly spending and opening themselves up for double+ spends due to their own misunderstanding of how to reliably track a spend (compounded by their coding errors).
Magic The Gathering Online Exchange.
Chase Manhattan, they are not.
JP Morgan Chase started as The Manhattan Company (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manhattan_Company). Formed to provide a clean water supply instead the owners took 95% of the $2 million to form a bank and created a system of waterworks that caused massive cholera outbreaks ... I don't think MtGox has killed anyone yet, though I've been convinced for a time that they've probably made-off with a lot of the money.
JP Morgan Chase aren't exactly trustworthy either, motivation based on pure financial profit will do that - a synopsis of some of their major indiscretions: http://www.icij.org/offshore/jpmorgan-chases-record-highligh...
He's a cancer and nobody should be using MtGox. You're supposed to trade coins in IRC decentralized using the web of trust, or localbitcoins in person. Exchanges should only be used if you have a business bank account and are on first name basis with the guy who runs Bitstamp or Cavirtex on IRC otherwise you get delays and holds for identity verification, limits, other problems like your bank freezing your account when they notice wires going to Slovenia too often.
*Edit Gavin just posted a response on the bitcoin foundation blog, confirming Gox is indeed full of shit.
The headline is "Largest Bitcoin Exchange Doesn't Understand Bitcoin"
What hope do retailers and any but the very-technical have in managing the risk implicit in digital currencies?
Not to mention, seeing supporting forum posts where people are discussing the parts of fractions of coin being sent around... do people really think 8-10 digits past the decimal can hope to be manageable for consumers? It's bad enough to deal with Yen conversions.
Please tip your server .00343874938239487 bitcoin. When 15% of the value can evaporate while business is happening... when do you bill the customer for lunch? When they order?
We've been through this several times with Mt. Gox. It's time for everyone to STOP using them and start using something else for trading. Continuing to use them and making rationalizations that things will 'get better' will only result in a global case of cognitive dissonance.
They are threatening an ecosystem that is important and which has a large potential value. In my opinion, they need to be removed from that ecosystem.
Ugh. Local wallets, people. Local wallets.
I feel really sorry for those with funds tied up with MtGox. It was only recently where I used MtGox to store most of my bitcoin and I am lucky to have decided to move them all to paper wallets.
This demonstrates one of the biggest issues holding back widespread adoption of bitcoin, the ability of the layperson to securely hold large amounts of bitcoin.
Here are 2 easy solutions to this problem which do not require anything to be done by the bitcoin community, and could be exacted by Mt. Gox today:
1. Allow all transactions to go through as before, but state clearly that if your transaction does not go through after being submitted, it will take a long time to clear the transaction, because it will have to be checked by hand. Assuming that 90% of people are not planning to scam Mt. Gox, 90% of people would be able to get their money. The remaining 10% would have to wait a bit longer while Mt. Gox checks transactions by hand.
2. Alternatively, write a system were a user can request to withdraw bitcoins. The Mt. Gox server first generates a new wallet, than transfers the BTC to that wallet, than send the user the public and private keys for that wallet. Assuming that the user (for good reason) does not trust Mt. Gox, they than can simply transfer the BTC from a temporary wallet to a permanent one.
I'm in Europe, and I like Kraken very much. blockchain.info recommended them.
I think a lot of the comments here and especially the article detracts from the discussion. The article seems to go on a rant of all the other mistakes mt gox make rather than addressing the issue.
What is the recommended solution by bitcoin implementers to verify a transaction succeeded, with transaction malleability existing ?