

Mtgox stops trading for 12 hours - gigavps
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=173383.0

======
ghshephard
I'm betting they are using this 48 hour window to upgrade their systems. The
most important hint was this:

"Additionally trading fees will not be charged within 48 hours of trading
resuming (until 2013-04-14 02:00am UTC)."

Seems like something they are offering to apologize for the inconvenience.

All told, between the 2 days of no trading, plus the 2 days of foregoing
fee's, MtGox will forego over $250K of trading fees. That's a pretty big hit.

[Edit: Confirmed by MtGox themselves:]

\-- snip --

Orders will not be accepted for the moment as we need to upgrade our database
to accommodate the trading volume. However, you may still cancel your pending
and open orders. Trading will resume at 11.00 am JST. Our apologies for the
inconvenience caused and thank you for your patience while we work to resolve
this issue.

]

[Edit #2 - I just realized, they are saying two, somewhat inconsistent
messages.

Message 1: Trading is halted until 2013-04-12 02:00am UTC to allow the market
to cooldown following the drop in price.

Message 2: Orders will not be accepted for the moment as we need to upgrade
our database to accommodate the trading volume.

~~~
FireBeyond
Funny, that this didn't happen when Bitcoin was climbing into the
stratosphere, but when it was crashing.

When your trading fees are a percentage of the value of the transaction, and
you most likely have a large personal investment in Bitcoin, you have a
-highly- vested interest in arresting a crash.

And yes, I know that MtGox is hardly the only place you can trade BitCoin, but
it's definitely the largest.

~~~
ghshephard
I just transferred all my BitCoins to <https://btc-e.com> \- for whatever
reason, you are only allowed to withdraw 100 Bitcoins/24 hours. Probably a
fraud insurance element - MtGox will cover any fraud, and they are limiting
their losses to 100 Bitcoins at a time.

~~~
kolinko
You can withdraw up to 1000/day once your account gets verified, and up to
10k/day once it's "trusted".

At least in case of USD limits, it's about anti-money laundering. The
government requires them to keep track of who's doing the withdrawals.

Aside from this, the limit was 400, but they lowered it to 200, and then to
100 when there were issues a year ago (a similar situation to today's - a
crash, and people panicking, etc.)

------
nlh
As a curious but uninvolved Bitcoin observer, a question: Why haven't any
alternate exchanges popped up? Seems that MtGox is still the go-to place to
trade, and I keep hearing about their constantly being behind the 8 Ball when
it comes to capacity, etc.

Or are there other exchanges out there and MtGox just gets all the press
because they keep breaking :)

~~~
tibbon
I'm curious how one writes software to link in as an exchange. I haven't read
the Bitcoin code throughly, but I'm not sure if I understand how to initiate a
transaction with the network. Is there anywhere that documents it well?

~~~
tlrobinson
The usual method is interfacing with bitcoind via the JSON-RPC interface:
<https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/API_reference_(JSON-RPC)>

There's also bitcoinj: <https://code.google.com/p/bitcoinj/>

~~~
verroq
What about making withdrawals to real life banks?

~~~
dangrossman
They're using 3rd parties like Dwolla for that.

------
Nursie
So what? Bitcoin's more than just a speculative.... pffft. Sorry, couldn't
finish that with a straight face.

~~~
gigavps
I do believe that the bitcoin payment network adds a great deal of value. As
for the price of bitcoin, it is still mostly driven by speculation.

As a business owner, there is nothing better than being able to transact with
anyone, anywhere in the world instantly. You certainly can't do that with
credit cards or paypal.

~~~
Nursie
I'm not sure it's such a great network, when you look at the ability of one
service (SatoshiDice) to effectively overload it to the point some people
started leaving their transactions out of their blockchain calculations.

As a consumer I also actually _like_ the chargeback and other protections
afforded to me by paypal and credit cards.

\--edit-- I'll add that technically I think it's a fantastic achievement, and
as an amateur crypto-geek it's fascinating. The people who came up with the
scheme and have coded it have done a great job (though there are the
aforementioned scalability problems), but I disagree with almost all the
design decisions that went into the vision of the thing.

~~~
kiba
_As a consumer I also actually like the chargeback and other protections
afforded to me by paypal and credit cards._

The flip side is higher price charged by merchants due to higher processing
fees. Not to mention that paypal will close down your accounts whenever they
feel that you are too suspicious.

Of course, with bitcoin, merchants will charge lower fees since they no longer
have to worry about chargebacks. Nobody also can't prevent you from spending
bitcoin as you like(as long it's your personal wallet).

~~~
Nursie
As I said, I actually like these features of paypal and CCs, even if prices
are slightly higher as a result. I definitely agree that competition in this
space would be good, but I don't think throwing out consumer-friendly features
is the answer.

To me, "no longer have to worry about chargebacks" is the same thing as "can
take your money and run, and there's nothing you can do about it".

~~~
kansface
Credit cards are a completely different model. When you hand someone your CC,
you say, "please take exactly the amount of money I'd like you to and no more.
Oh, and don't take any money out in the future, either." Only stolen bitcoins
have this problem.

~~~
Nursie
Not really. You're saying "I authorise exactly this amount of money and no
more", and if they then take any more or don't deliver the service it's fraud,
and you're protected from that by consumer credit law (at least you are here
in the UK).

------
buro9
It will be savaged when it comes back online, on some of the other exchanges
bitcoin is down to $66 : <https://btc-e.com/>

~~~
powertower
I wonder how much of bitcoin's run-up has been due to fraud on MtGox where
_market manipulators_ make specific small up-tick buy/sell transactions - that
are always moving the price up.

Now with MtGox out of the picture, the real demand and supply are meeting.

~~~
maxerickson
That only works if the honest participants are naively placing market orders
and paying zero attention to volume.

A thinly traded market is at least a great place to try it.

~~~
powertower
> That only works if the honest participants are naively placing market orders
> and paying zero attention to volume.

Doesn't that describe the bitcoin market exactly to a T?

I mean, I really don't care what the volume or price is - if I'm buying coins
to spend on SilkRoad that day. Which BTW, bootstraped Bitcoin from zero to 30
at least, and probably makes up 15-35% of the real demand (real _value_ ) for
it to this day (with the other major fraction being gambling sites)!

Nor do any of the get-in-quick-on-this-new-thing speculators that buy after
reading the latest bitcoin article.

And this all fits the fact that when the major EX closes, prices go down
_drastically_ on all the other smaller EXs. They should be going up instead
for obvious reasons (with such hot demand)! But they go down! Explain that one
to me please.

~~~
wmf
As it happens, I did that calculation last night: If SR facilitates $70K per
day of business and funds are escrowed for 5 days, that’s $350K in escrow at
any moment; dividing by 11M BTC gives a value of around 3 cents/BTC. I don't
think there's any way to get $30 from there.

~~~
powertower
That's too simplistic of a calculation. How many bitcoins are being stored on
SR addresses? How many bitcoins are sold by the sellers on SR? etc.

The notion that SR is responsible for 2-3 cents of bitcoins run-up in the last
2 years ... something not right about that figure.

------
kmfrk
Someone made the good point that this is probably in response to the
precipitous drop, as Americans are getting up in the morning.

<https://twitter.com/Brown_Moses/status/322351273045278720>

------
sgwil
Isn't it weird how whenever there's a massive selloff of Bitcoin, Mt. Gox
'experiences a DDoS attack' and closes trading???

~~~
dmm
It's other people that have blamed this on a DDoS attack. MtGox themselves
have explicitly denied it.

<https://mtgox.com/press_release_20130411.html>

""" First of all we would like to reassure you but no we were not last night
victim of a DDoS but instead victim of our own success! """"

~~~
FireBeyond
Success for an exchange that makes money on trades whether the price is going
up or down is a very different beast to success for someone losing half the
value of their investment...

------
awnird
Magic The Gathering Online Exchange

------
sks
Worst way to stop a crash.

~~~
Heliosmaster
well.. it's not unheard of: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trading_halt>

~~~
fr0sty
That is only effective if you have all exchanges working in a coordinated
fashion. Halting trading on a single exchange (even if it is the largest) does
nothing to arrest the fall since trading can (and will) continue at other
marketplaces.

~~~
leishulang
Awesome. I'm buying back in at $8.

~~~
cjg
Why is this comment exactly the same as the one posted by jeremyjh to the OP
two hours before yours.

------
tlrobinson
Bitcoin really needs a more distributed approach to exchanges. I don't know if
that means a peer-to-peer exchange solution like Ripple, or just a loosely
decentralized collection of exchanges.

A production quality open source exchange with focus on performance and
security would be awesome.

~~~
tomp
The problem are not bitcoins. The problem are dollars and other fiat
currencies. To be able to trade with those, you need to have them deposited in
an exchange's account. That's going to be difficult to change.

~~~
craigyk
Lol, I had to get pretty far down this time to seen the first mention of
'fiat'.

------
jeremyjh
Awesome. I'm buying back in at $8.

------
RutZap
Hopefully this will move some of the trade volume on other markets. Having
most of the trade of a decentralised currency on one market is not a good
idea, and I see it as something that goes against the idea of
decentralisation.

------
secalex
At least tulips had some innate utility.

~~~
iso8859-1
Which is?

~~~
emillerm
You can use them to decorate the memorial for your life savings :)

------
powertower
Down to 90-110 USD on some exchanges!

~~~
tlrobinson
$60 on BTC-e

------
eric970
Has anybody seen their bulletins? Their first one advised people to go
celebrate their "success" by drinking Champaign. Never mind that their
exchange just lost ~half of its net value. Yuck!

------
waterlesscloud
Well, I guess that answers the question about Bitcoin, whether it will be the
dominant cryptocurrency. The answer is no.

So now the question is, how long until an acceptable cryptocurrency comes
along? And what does version 2.0 look like?

~~~
antonb2011
"The Next Cryptocurrecy" is correct and is the phrase that tells you
everything you need to know. The proponents of Bitcoin try to pass it off as
being "As Good as Gold". However, unlike gold, whose supply is limited on
Earth, and cannot be expanded without radical measures (asteroid mining or
nuclear fusion), you can make as many new cryptocurrencies as you want. I
might also have a couple of hash functions up my sleeve, whose solutions are
difficult to compute, and so are "limited" in supply. Limited, that is, until
someone comes up with next ByteCoin, CryptoCoin, ScamCoin etc.

Additionally, a shallow market is always a perfect pump-and-dump opportunity.
Say you have a stock (or Bitcoin) that only has a volume of $100,000 a day.
Then, if you're a small hedge fund and have about $20,000,000 devoted to small
cap growth, or emerging market currencies, and your investment mandate allows
you a temporary tactical deviation, you can buy the WHOLE supply of an asset
for several WEEKS sending the price through the roof. When the crowd catches
on and starts pumping money into your asset you exit the market and allow it
to crash. Is it legal? No. Does it happen all the time? YES!

~~~
Drakim
While what you say is true, it's also possible to arbitrarily declare another
metal "the new gold" just like it's possible to make a new cryptocurrency.

~~~
craigyk
No it is not possible. All the possible alternative metals are already known
and traded commodities. Gold also has many properties that people find
desirable in a store of value: it is stable (resistant to oxidation),
relatively rare, workable (fairly soft), etc. A new hash is for the most part
equivalent to the last in the ways that count.

