58
I noticed this question was posted a long time ago and perhaps things have changed so I took the liberty to dig in again and also aggregate most of the answers given here and here’s what I found:
It’s indeed impossible to buy Bitcoins with Paypal DIRECTLY even today and it's mainly because of Paypal’s TOS (Section 3.7 here) and the issues of chargeback.
...
23
To actually try and answer your question, Mt Gox acted as a trusted middleman in btc trading, and thus had to have control over their users money.
Let's say dude A has a few btc he wants to sell, and dude B has a few dollars he wants to buy btc for. B doesn't want to pay until A sends him the btc, and A doesn't want to send his btc to B until B pays. ...
14
People had bitcoins loaded on Mt.Gox internal trading accounts (trading wallets). This goes both for fiat currency and bitcoins.
Bitcoin withdrawals were shut-down for a few weeks now, which created concepts like "goxbucks" or "goxcoins" as you could not get any Bitcoins out.
Now, the Mt.Gox is closed completely, so you cannot get either fiat currency or ...
11
Here's a good interview by Gregory Maxwell himself who's a Bitcoin developer:
Oh there is a “problem” in the Bitcoin protocol, known since at least
2011 (see the link I gave). But for normal applications, not involving
unconfirmed transactions, it shouldn’t cause any severe problems
because wallets can handle it locally.
This has to do with ...
11
This is generally called counterparty risk - if your resources are in custody of someone else, there is a risk that they go bankrupt and you lose it. And in that case it is too late and your options are limited to making a sadface :( and writing it off as a loss - do note that you can get x% of the loss back from your income tax in most places.
There are ...
10
What malleability means is that you can't store the transaction ID that bitcoind returns from its sendtoaddress API call and expect that number to mean anything at all later.
Instead, if you want to keep track of a high volume of outgoing transactions, you have to wait for the transactions to be fully confirmed and immune to blockchain reorganizations, and ...
10
It also shakes confidence in BTC both for the BTC community and the public in general. When I say BTC I am encompassing all other *coin. It is analogous to the failure of a large bank--except without any insurance.
8
One of the major reasons standing in the way of profiting from arbitrage opportunities has to do with "volume".
The volume for either exchanges is not high enough yet to support big trades. Large profits require large trades (in arbitrage). Making $1,000 may be feasible between exchanges, but that's an extreme best case scenario and using 10k in capital! ...
6
Something I am currently looking into, and a huge issue that nobody has really mentioned earlier is blockchain time.
1) Bitcoin is traded on a number of exchanges, however the entire process of buying on one exchange, transferring to another exchange and selling on that second exchange can take on the order of magnitude of 30 minutes(~10 minutes per block ...
6
Mt.Gox' escrow wallet service only checks transaction hash. If anybody changes transaction hash before transaction is included into block, service considers transaction invalid and returns coins back to the owner's virtual account. But transaction itself is not invalid, it is finally accepted and coins are sent to the owner.
It is primary bug in Mt.Gox's ...
6
Observations
Mt.Gox is currently offering neither fiat withdrawals, nor Bitcoin withdrawals.
No withdrawals means that the Mt.Gox price is completely decoupled from the Bitcoin market, as there can be no arbitrage to close the gap.
Precursors
Mt.Gox has handled the Malleable Transaction issue poorly, and squandered the trust of a lot of its users. ...
6
You are not going to like this:
Man-up and accept that you took a chance using MtGox and lost. The same applies to stocks, commodities, gold, etc. You decided to keep substantial funds in an unregulated exchange in an unregulated "currency".
What was lost was the amount in fiat currency represented by the BTC at the time you deposited them, not todays, ...
5
You're right that in this regard, Coinbase and Mt.Gox are similar: they control the private keys, and incompetence or malice on their part could result in the loss of your coins. One difference is that Coinbase doesn't keep a balance of USD (or other fiat) in your account, only bitcoins. The other major difference is that Coinbase has not (AFAIK) shown any ...
4
If your transaction from April still has no confirmation, it would be feasible to create another transaction that spends the same input to yourself. You could hope that your new transaction would be verified first, which would invalidate the other transaction and salvage your coins.
4
The sole and only reason to buy there, is because you already have fiat stuck there and you want to get it out ASAP.
About selling, if you are optimist you can say that some people value that the risk of Mt.Gox defaulting plus the time they have to wait without their money is less than the price difference with the other exchanges.
If you are pessimist, ...
4
I do not understand what do you mean by the current bitcoin price on the top (I can not see it), but I will clarify on some other numbers.
Last - the price of bitcoin based on the last transaction. So if I bought 1.2 bitcoins with a price of 950$ and this is the latest transaction so far, this number will appear in the last.
High - What was the highest ...
4
I received this email:
To whom it may concern,
At 5:00 p.m. on April 24, 2014, the Tokyo
District Court granted the order for the commencement of the
bankruptcy proceedings vis-à-vis MtGox Co., Ltd. (“MtGox”), and based
upon such order, I was appointed as the bankruptcy trustee (Tokyo
District Court 2014 (fu) no. 3830). The bankruptcy trustee will
implement ...
4
A popular opinion in the Bitcoin space is that transparency is key for Bitcoin businesses. Bitcoin and it's pseudonymous nature make it very suitable for scams and corruption.
Competitive fees or additional payment options are no longer the key to the success of an exchange. There are so many exchanges that you can almost certainly find what you need ...
4
MtGox has millions of USD missing according to the latest news reports. The final draft of what, where, how and why has yet to be published by the administrator however.
Some customers who lost money with MtGox are under the false impression that since their funds were in fiat currency instead of Bitcoin they would be safe and receive all of their money ...
4
Specifically:
They blamed transaction malleability for a hack, which was clearly a lie - blaming Bitcoin for their own mistakes.
They stopped withdrawals but continued allowing deposits and trading. A leaked strategy document shows that this was an attempt to conceal the size of their losses from the public, ie they didnt' come clean when they should have . ...
3
MtGox can disappear temporarily or permanently and take all your e-wallet bitcoins with it.
Mt. Gox has been severely hacked, with a massive reserve of its bitcoins stolen. ... a massive hack that has stolen as many as 744,000 bitcoins, fully 6% of all bitcoins in existence. ... "MtGox can go bankrupt at any moment".
Forbes 2/25/2014
I don't know of ...
3
I think this should help:
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/
Here you can view all the historical data:
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#tgSzm1g10zm2g25zv
And if you need any specific date you can hit "Custom time". :)
Hope this helps.
3
I think MtGox usually gives you a transaction hash immediately. You can use it to track it, for example on the blockchain or blockexplorer websites.
Even without the transaction hash, you can still use these websites to try and find it by looking for the Bitcoin address you have withdrawn to. You may wish to check your MtGox account history to see which ...
3
MtGox PubNub API and Websockets API
The two endpoints you are describing are indeed two separate endpoints which you will use under certain conditions depending on what you are seeking. The Public stream feeds and more can be accessed by issuing a .subscribe() PubNub SDK instance method call from the PubNub Class. For now the MtGox WS API is in deprecation ...
3
MtGox has stopped allowing people to withdraw bitcoins off of the site. What this means is that in an attempt to get money off the site everybody sells their bitcoins to begin wire transfers. When you have a bunch of people selling and no one buying, the price drops.
Mtgox's prices often get discounted because they are isolated from the rest of the bitcoin ...
3
Contact a Lawyer and sue them.
3
As I understand it (and wrote at more length in this question), the statement is technically correct but incomplete.
The result of a malleable transaction attack is that the targeted transaction (in which the victim voluntarily sent coins to the attacker) does not confirm, but an equivalent transaction with a different ID does confirm. It is true that this ...
3
In my humble opinion the ideal exchange works without needing to be trusted.
I mean that this exchange must find a way to work without having direct control on customer funds, this controls (private key) remain in the hands of the customers.
If this is not possible for the trade to occur, limiting as much as possible the funds controlled by the exchange is ...
3
The leaked database dumps (from when MtGox was hacked after they closed down) shows 189374 records as a result for this query:
mysql> SELECT * FROM platform.User_Wallet WHERE platform.User_Wallet.Balance != 0 ORDER BY platform.User_Wallet.Balance DESC;
Notes:
That's only non-zero balances
There are many currencies (BTC, USD, JPY, PLN, AUD, GBP, ...) in ...
3
AFAIK, the latest official news is the article After the CEO’s Indictment the Great Mt. Gox Bitcoin Mystery Deepens from the 14th of September 2015, and these two tweets:
PDG #Français de MtGox,banque #BTC basé à #Tokyo sera condamné sans jugement sur des charges n'ayant aucun lien avec disparition 50,000,000$ – @NathalieStucker (Jan 7th 2016)
and
...
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