+1: I think there is substance to that!

Remember Deepbit? Where did they invest all their coins?

It just occurred to me that although it is doubtful that pressure purely from mainstream financial institutions and regulators could drive Mt. Gox completely out of business, it is entirely possible that large players in the Bitcoin community could by engineering various liquidity events and such.  And Mt. Gox has made a lot of enemies (e.g., Peter Vessenes and the like.)  Not to mention all of the players who would like a bigger piece of the pie (e.g., Bitstamp, BTCChina, Bitpay, etc, etc.)

A combined effort between mainstream financial players and larger players in the Bitcoin sphere could have a really devastating effect on Mt. Gox in spite of Mark's long built empire of liquidity (including his Smaug-like situation sitting on atop pools of BTC of questionable history like to Bitcoinica stash and God knows what else.)

Just a hypothesis to mull over...

Oh, thank heavens!  I just transferred all of the BTC that I own back to Mt. Gox for safe storage.  And I wired the balance of my checking acount there as well.  Thx a million for the info!

jesus please stop with all the conspiracies, what's next mtgox was created by e.t.? 

it's simple, you cant withdraw fiat currency out of mtgox, so only way for people to get money out is to buy bitcoins and transfer it out. And for the bitcoin holders no point for them to sell on mtgox since they cant get money out, so they just transfer bitcoins out and sell elsewhere.  As more and more people realize this, the bid and sell side will continue to diverge, eventually end up in a panic.

an exchange cannot function if you cant get your money out. In the real world, if i went to any of the broker-dealer like interactive brokers or goldman sachs prop trading, and i cant wire out my money in the standard 24-48 hour window, major panic ensues and it will be on cnbc front page.

only reason noone gives a shit about mtgox taking months to wire money out is most have no clue, but now even their bitcoin is getting delayed by days, which is a sure sign of liquidity problems. 

Last time i will say this - get your bitcoins out of mtgox, it's just not worth the risk to leave it in there - there is no reward only risk.

ps: i got my initial 8 btc out finally after 3+ days.  I wrote another nasty email to them pretty much stating they are full of shit and i want my bitcoins or i will report them to the sesc, then a few hours later i got a reply saying in short oh the bitcoin was already transferred you made a mistake, i look up my block address timestamp and it was literally a few mins before the email was sent lol, i bet they manually did something to get the coins out then acted all innocent in the email.

funny stuff...

Just some more experience points to add to the history here:

1 requested $USD withdrawal Sept 4, periodically ask about its status, always get the 'slight delay' excuse email, sometimes they
mention the 5% fee for 'urgent' withdrawals.

2 subsequently reequested more $USD withdrawn, but once I realized it wasn't going to happen, cancelled that and saw my $USD balance restored within hours

As I understand, withdrawals to asian banks are still happening promptly?  If so, what does it take to create a foreign bank account to receive the withdrawn funds (in yuan) ?   

3: Made several BTC withdraw requests last night and got errors saying 'invalid btc address'... the addresses were valid though - when I tried the same one later, it succeeded.

5: Made BTC withdrawal at 10:30AM EST, it's still not received 11 hours later.  Emailed support who just said to wait 24 hours.

6: Made 2 more BTC withdrawals just now, both completed within several minutes.


What I'd like at this point is to find something I can buy and sell, or at least overpay for.... for example, overpay a utility bill in BTC, but get the balance refunded as $USD.   Has anyone found anything to purchase with BTC which can be resold or refunded at the same rate to USd?

If it comes down to it I will have to do similar tactics. My large withdrawal is still in limbo and not anywhere on the blockchain after 24 hours.

Exactly.  I get the impression that many people in the Bitcoin world have no clue what happens when a real broker defaults on their obligations. They're effectively out of business within hours, as other brokers won't deal with them, and they're closed down within days.

It is a valid and powerful technique in reaching and understanding of the world to consider as many hypotheses as one can dream up, then knock out one which fail to match observations.  In fact it a big part of why science has progressed so quickly after the age of enlightenment.

There is no shame whatsoever in considering a hypothesis which turns out to be incorrect.  Just the opposite really.  There is much shame in failing to consider a hypothesis because it conflicts with some sort of orthodoxy, dictate, or underlying desire for something to be a certain way.

I actually considered your hypothesis that Mt. Gox was created by E.T.  It to a fraction of a second of light work.  While I don't rule out the possibility, it is not a very productive avenue for analysis for a variety of reasons.