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Mtgox stops trading for 12 hours

96 points| gigavps | 13 years ago |bitcointalk.org

101 comments

order
[+] ghshephard|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
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.

[+] nlh|13 years ago|reply
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 :)

[+] ghshephard|13 years ago|reply
https://www.cavirtex.com/home is another alternative.

"Cold Storage is the act of sending Bitcoins to an offline wallet address. Access to withdraw these funds must be by a human being and with a computer that is never plugged into the internet. This guarantees that a hacker cannot steal the wallet through the internet. This is done with transaction signing and USB keys to transfer the signed transaction from the offline computer to the online Bitcoin network. Over $500,000USD was stolen from the Exchanges Bitcoinica and Bitfloor by hackers because they did not use cold storage. VirtEx uses cold storage on approximately 80% of customer funds.

We keep the remaining 20% in a server ‘hot’ wallet to allow the small daily BTC withdrawal activity to be instant. If the amount of your withdrawal is too large, you will be required to wait for a human to perform a cold storage withdrawal of your funds. We have many different cold storage wallets and use multi-signature authentication so there is never just one person who can access cold storage and large amounts. You can even choose to place 100% of your funds in cold storage with us; however you will not be able to trade the funds unless you withdraw them from cold storage. This feature is coming soon."

[+] moondowner|13 years ago|reply
You can keep track of all markets (or the most popular, maybe there are more) on this page: http://bitcoinity.org/markets

Here you have: mtgox, btce, bitstamp, bitcoin24, bitfloor.

[+] Nursie|13 years ago|reply
I'm another uninvolved observer, from what I've seen there are quite a number of other exchanges, many of them fail due to low volumes (and other reasons, some security related).

Whatever their relative strengths or weaknesses, Gox has captured most of the market, and is high enough volume to make it the most liquid and trusted exchange, so it's going to be hard to challenge.

[+] jscottmiller|13 years ago|reply
There are several other online exchanges [1], Mt. Gox just has the majority share by volume in several currency markets.

There are also many other informal exchanges, including in-person transactions and ebay.

[1] http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/

[+] lucaspiller|13 years ago|reply
MtGox was the one of (or the) first, but there are plenty of others. As I said in another thread earlier, Bitcoin24 [0] is a good, EUR focused, alternative.

[0] https://bitcoin-24.com/

[+] tlrobinson|13 years ago|reply
Yes: BTC-e, Bitcoin-24, bitfloor, Bitstamp, CampBX, VirCurEx

But MtGox gets something like 80% of all trades.

[+] tibbon|13 years ago|reply
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?
[+] smackfu|13 years ago|reply
This is kind of like asking, why didn't you switch away from them before they had these issues. Not much incentive.
[+] IanCal|13 years ago|reply
There are others, btc-e is quite big. MtGox is just the largest, and was one of the first.
[+] Nursie|13 years ago|reply
So what? Bitcoin's more than just a speculative.... pffft. Sorry, couldn't finish that with a straight face.
[+] gigavps|13 years ago|reply
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.

[+] baddox|13 years ago|reply
If the price drops, you use that as clear evidence that your models are correct. If the price rises, well then that's clearly just temporary market irrationality, and it will eventually drop again.
[+] ramchip|13 years ago|reply
Essentially the same comment is reposted in every bitcoin thread. It adds little to the discussion.
[+] jfoutz|13 years ago|reply
Pretty sure the intrinsic value is all the stuff you can buy on silk road.
[+] buro9|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
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.

[+] tomp|13 years ago|reply
The real price would probably be much higher right now, if people had the money. A lot of them have money deposited on MtGox, and they can't quickly transfer it to other exchanges, so there's a lot of BTC supply, but not a lot of USD supply (in forex, there's supply-supply, not demand-supply, if you can call BTC forex).
[+] SODaniel|13 years ago|reply
No doubt this is the REAL test of Bitcoin. I can see if hitting $30 again to bottom out.
[+] Nursie|13 years ago|reply
It's bouncing around all over the place, between about $70 and $110, but then it seems to be one of the few exchanges still in operation - bitstamp seems to have disappeared off the net too.
[+] sgwil|13 years ago|reply
Isn't it weird how whenever there's a massive selloff of Bitcoin, Mt. Gox 'experiences a DDoS attack' and closes trading???
[+] dmm|13 years ago|reply
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! """"

[+] awnird|13 years ago|reply
Magic The Gathering Online Exchange
[+] tlrobinson|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] leishulang|13 years ago|reply
ripples are made by opencoin. opencoin are mtgox ppl. they will manipulate the market at their own interest, just like they did with BTc
[+] jeremyjh|13 years ago|reply
Awesome. I'm buying back in at $8.
[+] RutZap|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
At least tulips had some innate utility.
[+] eric970|13 years ago|reply
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|13 years ago|reply
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?