So, each bit of news coming out of Gox makes me more likely to assume the worst.
When preparing for lawsuits, often the lawyers will recommend silence, and making sure that there are no public statements that are misleading. Given that they've been making reassuring comments all along, this makes me assume things are very bad indeed. I must assume they've been advised to stop making reassuring comments and saying things that could make them liable for more damages in court...or, worse, make them guilty of fraud.
Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions. Anybody else got theories on why they'd do something so extreme? I certainly can't think of any positive reason for them to do so.
On the other hand, destroying evidence once a lawsuit is filed is a definite no-no. But what's one more no-no in a career of no-no's?
An account compromise is possible.
Perhaps they're about to take some steps they'd previously publicly assured people they wouldn't, and don't want the obsolete assurances to be easy-to-reference.
Which is the line they use when advising you to establish a good data-retention-policy. Because any one-time 'reduction' effort is trivially connectable to intent by just about any court. Even when it's innocent.
This is criminal activity. They are tanking their market on purpose to buy up at firesale prices and make the most of their insider position with their customers locked without withdrawals.
I wonder what do they have in mind but this is a bonafide bucket shop and I have little doubt that they will be facing criminal charges.
Assuming for the moment that they are doing that - is it really criminal activity? I understand that it would be in regulated markets, but Bitcoin isn't regulated.
It doesn't matter what they deal with. MtGox is a financial services provider registered with the Japanese FSA that transmits money in multiple "recognised" currencies (AUD CAD CHF CNY DKK EUR GBP HKD JPY NOK NZD PLN RUB SEK SGD THB USD).
They are subject to Japanese law and International law. And also to US and EU law regarding AML/KYC of their citizens.
Bitcoin might not be regulated in most places to different degrees, but that doesn't mean you are above the law because you deal with Bitcoin among other things.
>>They are subject to Japanese law and International law. And also to US and EU law regarding AML/KYC of their citizens.
Is there any legal precedent for this? What would you sue Mt.Gox for? Do they have contracts or some form of binding agreement with people who store their BTC with them?
I'm not sure they're really bound by any laws in regards to currency. Maybe contractually, but beyond that, not sure what you could sue them for without some real concrete evidence of criminal activity.
You typically sue a company over torts, not crimes. A tort is a civil cause of action. "They deprived me of my property in a fashion we had not agreed upon" is a tort called conversion. There exist many other ones you could describe Mt. Gox as having committed. Japan and the US are friendly first-world nations; their courts routinely enforce each others' judgments. (You'd have to demonstrate tortious behavior in the US to the satisfaction of a Japanese court, which might not be straightforward, but that's the sort of thing you'd want to ask an actual Japanese lawyer rather than somebody with a cursory understanding of the matter.)
That said, most people hoping for recourse in a court of law do not understand the expense, timeline, and likelihood of actual collection involved. (Six figures, years, and "probably nil", respectively.)
MtGox isn't exactly FDIC(or whatever Japan's equiv) insured. What are you going to sue for? Who told you it was okay to buy these digital coins? I love Bitcoin, but I'm not denying the fact that it's essentially gambling[1] and I accept full personal responsibility for losing my own funds. Trusting any of these unregulated exchanges is part of the gamble. If the law did try to say MtGox has liability, I wonder how that'd effect the other exchanges out there.
1. Actually, it's worse than gambling since I don't think "legit" Casinos can legally just disappear over night causing you to lose funds that you haven't even gambled with yet. There is absolutely zero protection in the wild-west of bitcoin right now.
That's a good theory...they may be figuring out that they can't possibly provide what they've promised, and are wanting to not have an easy trail of evidence of exactly what has been promised.
But, I don't think deleting things from Twitter has ever been considered "destroying evidence" in court. But, I suppose there's a first for everything.
Usually, it'd be manipulating or deleting emails that have been subpoenaed, or other sorts of contractually binding documents (email can be a contractually binding document, Twitter probably not...yet). I dunno. Maybe we're about to see something interesting and new happen in the courts. I guess we're certain to, because Bitcoin hasn't had much play in the courts, yet. Will be interesting to see how this plays out.
I'm vaguely concerned that things that should be civil matters may end up becoming criminal matters because of the way Bitcoin is viewed by law enforcement and states. But, then again, this may very well be something that should become a criminal matter. I don't know enough to know.
It's also likely that Twitter still retains a copy of the Tweet even when deleted, and will be asked for copies during the discovery process if it comes to a lawsuit.
These messages would almost certainly be subject to a legal hold, even if no-one's actually started formal proceedings yet. Removing them from public view on Twitter is probably fine from a legal standpoint, deleting them entirely would be a very bad idea.
As far as I recall, their last tweet was something like Jan 7. So, while I can't make sense of their actions either, I haven't seen much damning evidence in their tweets and they stopped tweeting long before the current debacle started.
The tweets were usually just cut/paste snippets referring people to the support section of mtgox.com
Are these the actions of a company that intends to stay in business? I would hazard a guess that the answer to that question is "No." Who would be foolish enough to keep their money with mtgox after 3 weeks of silence, and now with them seemingly erasing their footprint off the Internet? Even the worst businessperson would know their actions are jeopardizing their viability as a business.
So, based on that assumption that they know they will no longer be in business, you need to decide, are they going to make their users whole before shutting down, or not? Again, I would hazard a guess that the high-probability answer is that they will not make their users whole. If they had enough money, it would seem that knowing they are going to go out of business, the best thing to do is make their customers whole and close up shop.
The fact they aren't do this, to me, suggests they are attempting to protect themselves. If my guess is correct, then it suggests that they don't have enough money and are trying to figure out how best to save themselves from being sued or worse.
Everything they are saying and doing is pointing to a negative outcome. Everything they are not saying and not doing is pointing to a negative outcome.
For examples of what they are doing, they have shut down withdrawals of any manner, they have moved their offices, they have erased their twitter presence.
Thing they have not done: state they are solvent. How simple of a thing for them to do - "hey, we have a security problem right now but don't worry, we are completely solvent." Instead they state things like, "Withdrawals will resume soon." That's not very specific - it could mean, "Withdrawals of 3 cents on the dollar will resume in a year and then you can make a claim to the bankruptcy court to get anymore. Good luck with that."
But let's say that all these signs pointing to a negative outcome turn out to be wrong and a positive outcome occurs. Then it's time to really investigate a current theory that they are purposely lowering the market price of Gox BTC so they can buy low and sell high on other exchanges.
I withdrew my money a couple of weeks ago to a European bank account, shortly before the news of their issues broke. It wasn't a fortune but it was a large enough amount to care about. Still hasn't made it onto my account. I doubt it ever will at this point.
I have been waiting since October for a transfer of USD to my bank account for an amount that I had sold 1 BTC for USD. I have had an open support ticket with them for 3 months now and they have held my money hostage.
Just last week when the price of BTC was lower than what I had sold mt BTC for, I asked them to cancel the withdrawal and credit my account. I then proceeded to purchase back more BTC than I had sold originally over 4 months ago.
Unfortunately my BTC is still held hostage until they reinstate BTC withdrawals but their support has confirmed that I will be able to withdraw my BTC.
There is hope. I ordered a SEPA withdrawal around New Year's Day, and received the deposit a few days ago. It was a very pleasant surprise to see the funds actually show up.
My only regret is ever going through their verification process at all. I never even ended up conducting any sort of business at the site (and I'm now grateful for this).
I have a very small amount of Bitcoin in Mt. Gox. If it never returns, it won't have a material effect on me. However, I'd obviously prefer to send it to another exchange. If anyone has new information on whether they'll ever come back online, I'd be really interested.
I am not sure why people blame Mt. Gox for a problem within the Twitter protocol that always 'deletions'. We discussed the solution with the Twitter core developers and will allow our tweets to be displayed again once it has been approved and standardized.
IMHO, this is a ruse. Only Gox knows if they are going under or not. By playing up the trend of bad news, they are forcing down the prices of Gox BTC which they can buy up at extremely generous prices.
The more they make it look like they are screwed, the cheaper people will sell. Thus they can keep this facade up for months. As long as they don't go under, they profit.
It's also possible they're not doing this out of greed but as a way to actually rescue their company. They may owe a lot of money and the only way they can make it through this without going under is by buying all the bitcoin back at a low value. The question is, how far do they go, and how much of the retained earnings do they commit to rescuing the company and how much of these retained earnings have already found their way into individual executive bank accounts.
That's still dishonest if they hold other people's bitcoins hostage so they have no recourse but to sell them to Mt Gox at low value. Their customers are at their mercy, and they're taking full advantage of that.
That is an interesting thought, except they would have zero trust or goodwill left with the community. They might be able to rescue the company financially but I don't see any chance of the company surviving after that.
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.
So in the current EU/US political climate, MtGox would be bailed out, meaning people who didn't invest their money with MtGox would be forced to make the people who did whole. Whereas in the current BitCoin climate, the investors suffer and will be forced to sue MtGox to reclaim their money.
Which is morally better?
No libertarian will tell you that either of these is a preferred outcome, but out of the two, the morally superior one should be relatively obvious.
Edit: The reason I say it would be bailed out is not because they are investment accounts but precisely because it was so huge in the BitCoin economy.
MtGox is an exchange, not a bank. I'm mentioning this because there is an important third person with a bank: the customer, not the investor.
With mtgox, every customer is an investor. When bailing out a bank, however, the rationale is often to help out the people who cannot be blamed: the customers.
I'm still not claiming that bailing out I banks is a good thing, but the comparison you make is a small apples/oranges thing.
This sounds a lot like the too big to fail argument and so it is not an apples/oranges thing. It's a sliding scale and the only reason it seems like it is apples and oranges to you is precisely because MtGox isn't big enough.
I'm not saying that customers of a bank should suffer for the investment side but let the investors suffer for their bad investments, if the political will is there.
> the morally superior one should be relatively obvious.
Except that it isn't. Hence why many smart people disagree on the issue.
The difference is meta-ethical. The TBTF argument is fundamentally a utilitarian one - it's saying, "This is distasteful, but we're going to do it anyway because we believe it will result in a better final outcome." The Libertarian take on the issue frames it in a fundamentally deontological light, as you have. It's concerned with the actions themselves, and doesn't even attempt to speculate on long-term practical consequences of any particular choice of action because they aren't relevant to the argument under that particular framing.
Which is fine, both are legitimate approaches to ethics. What bothers me is when the two camps start just talking past each other. Which is what seems to be happening when one makes a statement such as "the morally superior one should be relatively obvious" in this context. In terms of persuasiveness, it's reminiscent of the Verizon "Which one is bigger?" ad campaign - there's an attempt to get at something legitimate there, but it's overshadowed by a rhetorical approach that could make even the best argument in the world feel unpersuasive.
Cherry-picking one high-profile catastrophic failure isn't exactly an intellectually honest indictment of Libertarianism.
It's not like there's a shortage of better indictments to use.
That said, this whole episode might serve as an interesting case in relation to many Libertarian talking points, such as the relative merits of many regulations covering savings & loan organizations in most countries.
I suspect a high capacity USD/doge exchange with a Gox compliant API would be the most lucrative opportunity out there right now. But I'd need to recheck the viewpoint before acting on it.
Hmm, they are different problems. It depends on where they have their assets tied up. I'm not saying MtGox is solvent - I have no idea if they are or not - but in theory, they could be solvent while not having enough liquidity to fulfill their obligations.
If they have banking problems it has nothing to do with banks ability, but about banks willingness. International banking can be difficult, and almost all of that difficulty is about banks worried about fraud and money laundering. E.g. I remember trying to pay someone in Russia for some work some years back, only to find out my bank considered the Russian bank "too risky", and I had to transfer money via the Russian banks account in some US bank. When you're trying to be an exchange for a currency not supported by any government, I'm sure that's raised a ton of red flags in a lot of banks.
Note I'm not saying that is sufficient to explain MtGox's current predicament, but there's also every reason to assume that they have some degree of banking problems.
first thing I thought of when I watched that is when an enemy captures someone on the other side and forces them to read some statement saying how what the other side is doing is wrong.
The text in the info section was updated in the past few days, that is the interesting part not the old video. The guy in the video is an investor in Gox so he would be in a better position than most to know what is really going on.
A somewhat redundant exercise given all the tweet archiving and indexing services that are around nowadays. I can't help but think there's nothing sinister or suspicious here and more likely an account compromise.
There was another news a couple of hours ago that they resigned from Bitcoin foundation board, so it indeed is very sinister https://bitcoinfoundation.org/blog/?p=462
Did you read my first point? Whilst I understand it's perfectly normal for BTC community members to jump to rash conclusions, I feel this time it's misguided given the numerous ways that tweets can be recovered. So what exactly would wiping them achieve?
I'm not much of a fan of "X probably didn't do Y because I cannot guess what would be to gain."
There has been no word from Gox that their social account has been compromised so the clearest conclusion to guess is that they wiped their timeline. Why? That doesn't exactly matter before establishing who and right now the who seems to be Gox.
About 6 months ago (when Mt Gox had some other issues with people's money) I said:
> If you trusted a company that started out trading Magic: the Gathering cards with a significant amount of your money, you probably need the lesson you are going to learn from this.
And was mocked/dismissed. It's disheartening to me the blind spot that otherwise intelligent people have when it comes to BitCoin and BitCoin related businesses.
Probably because what they bought the domain for was utterly irrelevant to their competence or complete lack thereof.
The enemy is stupid the overcredulous decision-making of ideologues and the incompetence of people who want to handle your money. Adding more dumb information just confuses the issue.
Most of the replies you link to were just pointing out your comment was incorrect, or that judging tech companies based on their name isn't a particularly good approach. I don't see anyone defending MtGox's competence or business practices.
I pulled my money out of MtGox about 6 months ago... unfortunately I'm still waiting for them to process the wire transfer I requested, and this makes me suspect I may never actually see that money.
I am an asian, therefore my comment shouldn't be taken as racial. The moment I realized, Mt.Gox was an asian enterprise, (based in asia) I became wary of them, and put them on my least priority. I want people to transact their wealth/money only with those companies, which are located in countries, which have good repute for accountability and have strong judicial system. I don't mean, Japan is not one of those. But I don't know, I still can't put faith with any Asian company as yet, when it involves 'money'.
I'm not Asian but I live in Hong Kong and I never had this impression.
Most countries look at Bitcoin with some interest and suspicion.
I don't think that being Asian gives you super powers just like being Westerner gives me any more insight about the financial stability of Western countries.
If you know something specific about laws or business practices in Japan that may shed a light on the whole issue then feel free to enlighten us.
I would say though that your trust in Western institutions is a bit misplaced. Enron lost billions and ruined lives. You could say that some of the culprits are in prison but that's poor consolation for those who lost everything.
More recently, the whole of the banking industry almost collapsed under the weight of its own greed and malpractices, bringing down with it whole countries and forcing tax payers to foot the bill to prop up these honorable institutions.
The moment I realized that mtgox stood for fucking magic the gathering online exchange is when I became weary/started laughing at people who put their imaginary fun bux in there, Asian enterprise notwithstanding.
Even though the founder isn't Asian at all, but a French techie who moved the Japan to become an entrepreneur? And the top management appear to all be non-Asian?
I'm not saying your concerns don't have some basis, but MtGox was not a relevant example. Unless you mean that Westerners moving to Asia to set up businesses automatically can't be trusted either.
Even thinking about it, makes me feel dirty. But since things can’t get any worse than this, let me please ask this.
Is it mere coincidence that the creator of Bitcoin is of the same origin as the Mt. Gox. I am feeling guilty for asking this, and I would be pleased, if I remain guilty forever for asking this, than otherwise.
I think it's evident that frameworks are being drawn to wrestle "the bitcoin question" into some mechanism of control / oversight. Look to US exchanges that partner and work within these frameworks to remain in good graces. I imagine that's the reality of it.
Hey, at least there's a chance they might finally delete all the sensitive user data they have on hand - presumably stored in a less-than-secure fashion.
Merely rebranding won't resolve the millions in obligations they have to customers. There's real money at stake here; it's very unlikely that it will be something that can be swept under the rug.
When preparing for lawsuits, often the lawyers will recommend silence, and making sure that there are no public statements that are misleading. Given that they've been making reassuring comments all along, this makes me assume things are very bad indeed. I must assume they've been advised to stop making reassuring comments and saying things that could make them liable for more damages in court...or, worse, make them guilty of fraud.
Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions. Anybody else got theories on why they'd do something so extreme? I certainly can't think of any positive reason for them to do so.