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.
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.
MtGox's new signup rate has grown significantly in the past month. It went from hundreds to thousands to over 20,000 new traders yesterday. A crash coincides with high volume (1 hour+ trading lag) -- a perfectly technical reason to fix the issues now regardless of the finances. At some point they need to get the new infrastructure in place (see: http://coinlab.com).
I just transferred all my BitCoins to https://btc-e.com - for whatever reason, you are only allowed to withdraw 100 Bitcoins/24 hours. Probably a fraud insurance element - MtGox will cover any fraud, and they are limiting their losses to 100 Bitcoins at a time.
You can withdraw up to 1000/day once your account gets verified, and up to 10k/day once it's "trusted".
At least in case of USD limits, it's about anti-money laundering. The government requires them to keep track of who's doing the withdrawals.
Aside from this, the limit was 400, but they lowered it to 200, and then to 100 when there were issues a year ago (a similar situation to today's - a crash, and people panicking, etc.)
I think the volume/unit time during the crash is generally higher than during the bubble phase. This can be seen in the steeper slope of price-time graph during declining phase compared to the rising phase of most bubbles. I guess fear is a quicker call to action than greed in financial markets.
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 :)
"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."
It's not an excange, but does anyone know how secure blockchain.info's wallets are? Everything I've read says they're very secure, but I haven't seen any unbiased experts say that...
Is it possible to buy bitcoins on, say Bitstamp @ $85 and then turn around and immediately sell them on Bitfloor @$94? Surely not? What keeps one from doing that? Or does that generally happen until the markets even out?
Note: I don't own any bitcoins (I am averse to risk), just curious and interested and know nothing about ForEx
It is non-trivial to get dollars into accounts on exchanges. It is also not an instant transfer of bitcoins from one exchange to another. your two step process really is a four step one:
0. Get dollars to Bitstamp to buy bitcoins
1. Buy bitcouns from Bitstamp
2. Transfer bitcoins from bitstamp to bitfloor
3. sell bitcoins on bitfloor (assuming the price hasn't changed).
What you are describing is "location arbitrage" (exploiting differing prices for the same goods in different locations). and it is one of the ways that prices get moved back into line.
With a bit of investment you could have some funds in all the exchanges and thus you could buy low on one exchange and sell high on another within milliseconds. Then you just balance the funds in the background to prevent running out of some type of resource on an exchange, but it doesn't have to be instant because you already have all types of funds on all the exchanges anyway.
Well, in order for this to work you'd have to have a BTC position in the exchange that's quoting higher in the first place. You would have to have entered that position at a price that is lower than your planned exit price in order for this to be profitable. You're still just as susceptible to volatility.
You can do it, but most exchanges require 6 confirms which can take around an hour. You'll be betting that the price difference will be just as good in an hour.
It is worth mentioning that since Mt. Gox has the highest confidence in the exchanges market, it consistently trades 10 - 20% higher than other exchanges almost all the time (unless major market movements propagate downwards from Gox, in which case it would be trading lower before everyone else, but that reaction time is measured in minutes or seconds for cost correction across exchanges) so if you want, you can buy more "risky" bitcoins from less popular exchanges, move them into Gox, and sell them in Gox, doing so successfully means you took the "risk" on a less popular exchange and get the difference in moving the money into a more confident market.
Just as an example, bitstamp is trading at $75 while Mt. Gox is at $120 right now. So if I were to buy bitstamp coins, assuming no major market movements rapidly drove Gox down (which would also drive bitstamp down too) you could move BTC from stamp to Gox and pocket a profit of around $45 per coin by taking the risks involved.
Mt. Gox is not at $120- trading has been suspended per TFA. That price was what it was at when trading was suspended, and because of the suspension it has caused the price to crash at other exchanges.
Its important to note that right now the Mt. Gox prices (the default graph) are not representative, because trading there is suspended. This is the link to the bitcoin-24.com market: http://bitcoinity.org/markets/bitcoin24/USD
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.
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.
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?
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.
I'm not sure it's such a great network, when you look at the ability of one service (SatoshiDice) to effectively overload it to the point some people started leaving their transactions out of their blockchain calculations.
As a consumer I also actually like the chargeback and other protections afforded to me by paypal and credit cards.
--edit-- I'll add that technically I think it's a fantastic achievement, and as an amateur crypto-geek it's fascinating. The people who came up with the scheme and have coded it have done a great job (though there are the aforementioned scalability problems), but I disagree with almost all the design decisions that went into the vision of the thing.
As a consumer I also actually like the chargeback and other protections afforded to me by paypal and credit cards.
The flip side is higher price charged by merchants due to higher processing fees. Not to mention that paypal will close down your accounts whenever they feel that you are too suspicious.
Of course, with bitcoin, merchants will charge lower fees since they no longer have to worry about chargebacks. Nobody also can't prevent you from spending bitcoin as you like(as long it's your personal wallet).
As I said, I actually like these features of paypal and CCs, even if prices are slightly higher as a result. I definitely agree that competition in this space would be good, but I don't think throwing out consumer-friendly features is the answer.
To me, "no longer have to worry about chargebacks" is the same thing as "can take your money and run, and there's nothing you can do about it".
Credit cards are a completely different model. When you hand someone your CC, you say, "please take exactly the amount of money I'd like you to and no more. Oh, and don't take any money out in the future, either." Only stolen bitcoins have this problem.
Not really. You're saying "I authorise exactly this amount of money and no more", and if they then take any more or don't deliver the service it's fraud, and you're protected from that by consumer credit law (at least you are here in the UK).
Raw bit-coins can't do fast transactions without risking double spends. Which limits you to a ~20 min checkout process or using 3rd party services then you deal with whatever their rules are.
You also can't "instantly" transact with Bitcoin, unless you're willing to risk a double-spend. You have to wait for confirmations through the blockchain which involve fees AND waiting (or really really long waiting) -- if you're going to pay a fee, why not just use the CC network and get it done instantly? At least when you get an auth from the CC network, you know you're guaranteed the money. When a transaction completes on the blockchain, it's still up in the air until the next block is produced by enough people.
> 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.
How about being able to transact with 99% of your customer base in a reliable, fraud-proof manner?
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.
So far it seems to work that way, yes. And no, not because there's no way a prediction of that sort can fail. Slow, steady gains and a long plateau would disprove me. But this doesn't happen because BTC basically seems to suffer from massive hype cycles.
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.
> That only works if the honest participants are naively placing market orders and paying zero attention to volume.
Doesn't that describe the bitcoin market exactly to a T?
I mean, I really don't care what the volume or price is - if I'm buying coins to spend on SilkRoad that day. Which BTW, bootstraped Bitcoin from zero to 30 at least, and probably makes up 15-35% of the real demand (real value) for it to this day (with the other major fraction being gambling sites)!
Nor do any of the get-in-quick-on-this-new-thing speculators that buy after reading the latest bitcoin article.
And this all fits the fact that when the major EX closes, prices go down drastically on all the other smaller EXs. They should be going up instead for obvious reasons (with such hot demand)! But they go down! Explain that one to me please.
I think the difficulty of moving dollars in and out of the various exchanges makes it risky to draw much conclusions about which way things should go when Mt. Gox is down (A vaguely reasonable explanation would be that people get a little more sell happy on bad news, with a limited supply of dollars looking to buy).
As it happens, I did that calculation last night: If SR facilitates $70K per day of business and funds are escrowed for 5 days, that’s $350K in escrow at any moment; dividing by 11M BTC gives a value of around 3 cents/BTC. I don't think there's any way to get $30 from there.
This seems like a bit of a stretch to me, absent other information. Why do you suspect mtgox has been manipulating the exchange rate (or at least providing an exchange on which to do so).
No, I did not say MtGox was manipulating the market, but people with accounts there were.
See my further comment in this thread.
Also note that fraud (all forms of it), the criminal element, and everything bitcoin related is not exactly too far apart from each other on any given day.
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).
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.
Success for an exchange that makes money on trades whether the price is going up or down is a very different beast to success for someone losing half the value of their investment...
That is only effective if you have all exchanges working in a coordinated fashion. Halting trading on a single exchange (even if it is the largest) does nothing to arrest the fall since trading can (and will) continue at other marketplaces.
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.
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.
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.
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!
"The Next Cryptocurrecy" is correct and is the phrase that tells you everything you need to know. The proponents of Bitcoin try to pass it off as being "As Good as Gold". However, unlike gold, whose supply is limited on Earth, and cannot be expanded without radical measures (asteroid mining or nuclear fusion), you can make as many new cryptocurrencies as you want. I might also have a couple of hash functions up my sleeve, whose solutions are difficult to compute, and so are "limited" in supply. Limited, that is, until someone comes up with next ByteCoin, CryptoCoin, ScamCoin etc.
Additionally, a shallow market is always a perfect pump-and-dump opportunity. Say you have a stock (or Bitcoin) that only has a volume of $100,000 a day. Then, if you're a small hedge fund and have about $20,000,000 devoted to small cap growth, or emerging market currencies, and your investment mandate allows you a temporary tactical deviation, you can buy the WHOLE supply of an asset for several WEEKS sending the price through the roof. When the crowd catches on and starts pumping money into your asset you exit the market and allow it to crash. Is it legal? No. Does it happen all the time? YES!
A currency needs a community. Bitcoin has a community. Anyone that 'makes as many new crypocurrencies as they want' will quickly find they dont have a community.
While what you say is true, it's also possible to arbitrarily declare another metal "the new gold" just like it's possible to make a new cryptocurrency.
No it is not possible. All the possible alternative metals are already known and traded commodities. Gold also has many properties that people find desirable in a store of value: it is stable (resistant to oxidation), relatively rare, workable (fairly soft), etc. A new hash is for the most part equivalent to the last in the ways that count.
How long do you get to keep calling them amateurs? They are running an exchange that deals with millions of dollars of money, and people continue to use them.
"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.