I'm kind of in the dark about Mt.Gox, is their recent downfall just the fault of inexperience when dealing with complex code and Bitcoin or did the team at Mt.Gox actually act with malice, attempting to steal money from people?
Is Mt.Gox just a startup made of 2 brothers and a fullstack engineer that happened to hit it big and muck up brilliantly when they scaled?
Part of me feels really sad (granted I don't participate in Bitcoin at all) because these guys may actually go to jail for fraud. I just want to know if my moral compass is pointing in the right direction.
There comes a point where incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
MtGox has had so many incidents that they would have faced sanctions in a regulated market. But then the people giving money to MtGox should have seen just how flaky MtGox was.
It is sad and frustrating that this happened. I kind of want bitcoin to take off. And I especially want to avoid saying "told you so" because that's just being a dick.
Not really. A year ago, it had already been crap for quite a while... it just still had a sizable club of apologists saying "don't be so hard on them, they've done so much good".
They failed to set up a proper testing pipeline. They failed to fix known issues with their BitCoin implementation after months. This would have been much easier had they actually built up their organization with all the profits they were seeing. As CEO Karpeles should not be touching code - he should be managing what was a large and growing company and building up a competent organization so that it could adequately manage a quickly growing amount of other people's wealth. But judging by the fact that Karpeles has still been coding himself, Gox did not build up its organization at all.
It seems like he probably wanted his overhead to stay low and avoid paying people who were better than he was to fix the rather significant problems with their BitCoin implementation. Which means this isn't just a tale of incompetence it's a tale of greed.
Who knows when Mt Gox failed to be solvent? It could have been a really long time ago. A ponzi scheme can go on indefinitely as long as deposits exceed withdrawals. It seems that the BTC "bug" shook things up, and much like any financial crises they were suddenly exposed.
Is Mt.Gox just a startup made of 2 brothers and a fullstack engineer that happened to hit it big and muck up brilliantly when they scaled?
Part of me feels really sad (granted I don't participate in Bitcoin at all) because these guys may actually go to jail for fraud. I just want to know if my moral compass is pointing in the right direction.