After waiting for nearly 4 weeks, I have asked them to cancel my sepa withdrawal, what they almost instantly did.
Then I bought some BTC and transferred them to my wallet.
This "artificial demand" drives the price higher and higher. Until the day MtGox goes bankrupt.
Indeed, the btc price is only rising because most people cannot withdraw fiat. So the price is very artificial and will eventually deflate back to $100-$120. At current $230 price you would expect a lot of early adopters to cash out, earning millions. But gox can't deliver and other exchanges don't have enough cash.
I agree that the demand on Gox is artificial, but the fact is that is well backed by huge action on both BTCChina and Bitstamp.
In my opinion the problem with Gox going broke is the loss of confidence of big investors. Many big whales are still on Gox, the cash on Gox is still one order of magnitude bigger than on Bitstamp while the supply of coins is shrinking dramatically on all the exchanges.
If Gox goes bankrupt many big investors will lose tons of money, and that will be a huge hit to the confidence on the whole BTC ecosystem.
It's kind of a vicious circle, because for people to run out of Gox in BTC some other people need to have GoxUSD in the system.. . I for one pray for them to pull their shit together ASAP, but every day that passes is more unlikely in my opinion. If Gox goes busto the customers stuck in will be "Goxxed" for real, and we will have news on every media outlet about how regulatory pressure (Dwolla account seizure) and bad management/internal disputes (coinlab issues) made innocent investors to lose millions of $.
What makes me extremely angry is that bastard at the head of the Bitcoin foundation who is holding onto $6M of
Goxs customers money demonstrating he doesn't give a shit about BTC, he is just into maximizing his profit. If this falls apart, in my book most of the blame is on him and not on Karpeles.
