You've got to bear in mind that they're talking to reddit. I think thats a fair description of why they can't upgrade at the drop of a hat. As they say elsewhere in the AMA:
We are big in the bitcoin world, but compared to a Facebook or a Google or even a bank we are too small and don't have access to their technology
> Cloud solutions are not meant for large scale operations such as trading systems
Arguably, hosted cloud solutions aren't ideal for large scalable operations, if you define "large scale" as in "someone with the scale of Amazon, Google, etc. that can afford to run a private cloud."
But MtGox makes it pretty clear that they aren't on that scale. Their argument seems to be simultaneously that they are both too "large scale" for hosted cloud solutions and too small scale to be able to effectively address the challenges they face in-house, which, if we accept it, seems to indicate that they are at a scale that cannot effectively operate.
Right. They couldn't effectively operate in the face of a huge trading spike and a DDOS. Hence they're upgrading. But then they get stick for taking too long to upgrade.
Conversely, if they spent $$$ on a bulletproof platform, they'd probably go bust (as seems to have happened to other more technically proficient exchanges)
The underlying problem is: people have too high expectations of what the bitcoin world can cobble together at this point. Its being built by hackers, not bankers.
> Conversely, if they spent $$$ on a bulletproof platform, they'd probably go bust (as seems to have happened to other more technically proficient exchanges)
If that's true, it would seem to indicate that no one with the resources to eat the cost of operating a reliable exchange through the expected growth period of bitcoin has sufficient long-term confidence in bitcoin to underwrite the growth-phase costs in order to reap the rewards once bitcoin is all grown up.
> The underlying problem is: people have too high expectations of what the bitcoin world can cobble together at this point. Its being built by hackers, not bankers.
Expecting the main exchange for something that is promoted as a currency to meet the reliability expectations of a currency exchange is not unreasonable.
As far as I can make out from reading #bitcoin, their whole service runs on a single server currently. The very notion that they could be too big for any hosting provider is hilarious.
We are big in the bitcoin world, but compared to a Facebook or a Google or even a bank we are too small and don't have access to their technology
What would you have them do?