Bitcoin or bust: MtGox files for bankruptcy protection Ailing Bitcoin exchange MtGox has filed for bankruptcy protection after admitting it did indeed "lose" 750,000 of its customers' Bitcoins along with 1000,000 of its own – together worth about £283m. Lawyers for the digital funny money dealer told Tokyo District Court that MtGox had debt of ¥6.5bn yen (£38.1m, $63.8m). MtGox …
I saw a post somewhere that deconstructed the statements made by MtGox, and that made it look more like a blend of incompetence and scam. Given the tendency of a non-government managed currency to attract criminal funds it strikes me that those who were operating this are well advised to buy new identities...
All except the Icelandic banks where their Russian gangster customers didn't get bailed out.
(Though the British savers did - despite chasing unreasonably high interest rates)
Its always surprised me that Reykjavik harbour ISN'T full of dead bankers with "concrete shoes".
I understand that Tokyo bay is very dark at night ....
Yeah, that's right. Better hand it over to the professionals at Lloyds, RBS and NatWest.
</sarcasm>
Oh I dunno, now the amateurs are out, they can get the organised (crime) people in to do it all properly.
I mean after all, they're already significant stakeholders aren't they? They'll want their safeguards, presumably in the form of baseball bats, hospital visits and long snoozes with underwater creatures.
I've been watching this one for a while, and other interesting tidbits to come out over the last few days;
* A guy claiming to have interviewed for a website UI position with them says that MtGOX up until recently had no development environment at all - all changes were made to the live site
* A large sum of coins directly owned by MtGox have not moved since some time in 2011, yet are have been claimed to be 'hacked', 'lost' or 'inaccessible', opening up the possibility that this isn't a complete theft (although some level of theft is also probable), but involves losing the keys to the virtual safe in a stunning display of further ineptitude.
I wonder if they can go back to trading Magic the Gathering: Online cards after this...
I'll admit that my understanding of bitcoins is shaky at best but from what I understand, if a user loses access to their wallet then they've essentially lost the bitcoins since there's no longer any way to prove ownership. Is it not possible that MtGox has 'lost' the bitcoins simply by losing an array of hard-drives due to hardware failure? If this is indeed "amateur hour" it seems a bit much to expect any sort of robust backup mechanism.
When was the last time you heard of a bank giving away half their money because they didn't do proper accounting and only hired blind tellers who would give away £20s instead of £10 by accident, then lose the keys to the vault, effectively sealing away the rest? Then closes down the bank for withdrawals for months, while still accepting deposits, all the while saying 'just technical problems'.
Insider trading, bad investments, insane payouts to bosses, mis-selling yes, but I'm willing to bet we've never seen ineptitude (or criminality) on this level.
I imagine that a great many of us, who were lamenting that we had missed riding the virtual escalator to riches beyond our wildest dreams, are somewhat relieved that, while we may have missed the bubble, we also avoided the inevitable 'pop'.
I think it was the expectation of something like this which had many of us hold our nerves and not jump on board the bandwagon. It's all well and good saying it's no worse than brick and mortar banking, pointing to other bank disasters, but we know deep down it's not really like that at all.
Let's face it - It was about as safe as giving a drug addict your wage packet to go score some gear. All promises and guarantees are as virtual as the currency.
Ya know what the real interesting thing is, and what scares governments and bankers?
The fact that even all of this.....people are STILL WILLING to go with bitcoin because the huge positives about being able to get out from under their control are worth even more risk than this.
The ability to not be slaves and subservient to the masters with your wealth is worth a HUGE amount of potential risk of not being 'regulated'.
"Ya know what the real interesting thing is, and what scares governments and bankers?
The fact that even all of this.....people are STILL WILLING to go with bitcoin..."
I'm sure the governments and bankers are feeling something about all this, but I don't think it's necessarily fear.
"...The ability to not be slaves and subservient to the masters with your wealth is worth a HUGE amount of potential risk of not being 'regulated'..."
The ability not to be slaves and subservient to the masters by trusting my money to a bunch of hucksters who might, at any time, fold up and disappear with my money, and... oh, Christ, my brain hurts. Where the hell do you start with balloon juice like this...?
Fool...Money...Parted...
Any currency (or language, i.e. Esperanto) without an army behind it is doomed to failure.
Of course, I haven't seen the Mafia try its hand on a currency, but they might given their vested interest. Stranger things have happened.
As an IT Specialist, all I can say is they stole the money. You don't handle millions of dollars of other peoples money with a shitty computer infrastructure. With no internet security! This was done on purpose. Don't you see? It was a hellova scam since the beginning. We will now have a good black market for these coins. OK Russians, hand over the coins.
Master Rod
rich people's money, nor was it a sum of money large enough to destabilize a small country's economy, therefore the bit coins are gone
Now if 1 of the 2 conditions above were met... we'd all be paying an extra 10% income tax to help bail them out while being told it was for our own good and yes, we are part of a capitalist economy.....
Boris
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Knew this would happen and fuck those idiots that thought this was a safe bet.
I mean like really, really lost. As in not existing in this universe. Real money leaves traces or shreds of paper or ash or smoke or something behind it. With strong encryption it's possible to really lose digital stuff without a trace. Destroy the key by accident and it's gone forever. (Okay, not taking into account possible future quantum computer breakthroughs)
So paper money can't be incinerated into invisible particulate matter and coinage can't be melted down into a useless amalgamation of base metals? You may still have stuff left afterward, yes, but whatever the heck it IS, the one thing it certainly ISN'T is money. Besides, by law, there has to be a way to retire old money so that fresh currency can take its place.
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