Mt. Gox Bankruptcy: What Bitcoin Owners Need to Know

[Guest]

What happened at now-shuttered Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox? And what does it mean for the future of the increasingly popular cryptocurrency?

Mt. Gox Bankruptcy: What Bitcoin Owners Need to Know : Read more

 

[the1kingbob]

Just to clarify, I was under the impression that you couldn't transfer out USD from MtGox. You had to transfer out something else and then convert it, so there is absolutely no chance the US government is going to do anything; also the company is/was based in Japan. I believe it is generally accepted that coins will not be refunded, just won't happen. The question I think most people have is, if you were owed CASH will you get it? My officemate was owed 7K two weeks before they froze the coin transfer system. He was just waiting for them to process the money and deposit in his account. He has a money lien against the company, not coins. That is what people want to know and is the reason the coin dropped in price on mtgox. People would rather be owed money than coins.

 

[InvalidError]

Since many governments want to ban Bitcoin or otherwise disapprove it, the easiest way would be to simply not recognize it as a currency and ignore Bitcoin theft and fraud due to Bitcoin having no legal value so no value is lost - why would governments spend tons of public money to protect a currency they would have a hard time collecting taxes on and was partly designed to make tracking transactions to their real owners anyway?With no legal protections, people trade in crypto-currencies entirely at their own risk. How many more Silk Roads and Mt.Gox will it take before most people lose interest/faith in it?

 

[LordConrad]

It's best not to let funds sit in a Bitcoin exchange site, because you're trusting someone else with a lot of legal leeway and mostly minimal oversight to take care of your money.

This fact should have been obvious to everyone. The only time I sent Bitcoins to Mt. Gox was when I sold them for cash, and I only transferred the coins I was going to sell.

 

[ezeuba]

Has anyone ever given thought to the possibilty that this whole scenario could have been an orchestrated scam by the owners of Mt . Gox? I mean why would a company with such a huge undertaking (850,000 bitcoins) not make an effort to close a gaping hole it has been aware of since 2011? If it smells fishy, and looks fishy - it is fishy...

 

[xspkbstr]

If it sounds too good to be true then it usually is...I "earn" digital money by just crunching numbers on my computer and I can buy things with it. Sweet...NOT. Just one big complex con-artist scheme. Poor suckers.

 

[kawininjazx]

People are going crazy for bitcoins all of a sudden, but I notice most of them live with their parents so they can pay the electric bill.

 

[coolitic]

Before investing tons of money make sure it can't be stolen obv.

 

[Guest]

Hopefully we can see the prices of AMD GPUs fall to reasonable prices very soon.

 

[bustapr]

people are definitely going crazy about bitcoin, but the craze is just a bit late imo. It gained the extremely high value seemingly overnight and I believe that was the peak. people who had lots of bitcoin before that became filthy rich(or almost), but people who came in after that point started losing money. Im not at all excited about investing time and money into such a volatile business. and Im definitely not interested in investing into a business that gets hacked every other day and you cant really do anything about it when all your money disappears. I hate to wish people to lose their money, but I really want this to end. Bitcoin brings more problems than its worth. noones decided on how to tax the stuff and the "untrackable" part of it makes it a legal haven for criminals. it just needs to end...

 

[RCguitarist]

it just needs to end...

Yep. It's a dumb fad that will go away in the next year or two. It's a completely unneeded thing. It serves no purpose and nobody would ever use them at all if it weren't for the whole farming thing which people see as free money. As they say, a fool and his money are soon parted.

 

[ferooxidan]

Good news! Tho I'm really sorry for the victim, but this is good news. Soon people will lose interest in Bitcoin and soon R9 290X will be the best bang for bucks card again. Soon...

 

[FloKid]

it just needs to end...

Yep. It's a dumb fad that will go away in the next year or two. It's a completely unneeded thing. It serves no purpose and nobody would ever use them at all if it weren't for the whole farming thing which people see as free money. As they say, a fool and his money are soon parted.

I would like to see you when all of your money is gone hippo.

 

[jimmysmitty]

Hopefully we can see the prices of AMD GPUs fall to reasonable prices very soon.

Bitcoins are no longer viable with GPUs. In fact that happened almost a year ago when the difficulty ramped up like crazy and still is since they have ASICs that can put out 200GH/s while the best GPU can only do 1200MH/s.

Litecoins are the reason AMD GPUs are inflated since they were designed around memory speeds more than anything and will never become as non-viable with GPUs.

This does suck for those who had money in Mt. Gox but I never used them after they kept getting hacked and DDoSed all the time.

 

[bison88]

Hopefully we can see the prices of AMD GPUs fall to reasonable prices very soon.

Bitcoins are no longer viable with GPUs. In fact that happened almost a year ago when the difficulty ramped up like crazy and still is since they have ASICs that can put out 200GH/s while the best GPU can only do 1200MH/s.Litecoins are the reason AMD GPUs are inflated since they were designed around memory speeds more than anything and will never become as non-viable with GPUs.This does suck for those who had money in Mt. Gox but I never used them after they kept getting hacked and DDoSed all the time.

Yeah the way the other mining coins are built, there wont be any reason to abandon GPU's for quite some time. I would expect the same problems that have plagued Bit Coin to affect others though. It's still gambling at this point and the value can rise and drop huge margins in the scope of just a day. Let alone you better hide your coins offline on a flash drive or what not. Many vulnerabilities are now using infected machines as miners and to rob them of their coins.Huge risk people are taking.

 

[wdmfiber]

Good news! Tho I'm really sorry for the victim, but this is good news. Soon people will lose interest in Bitcoin and soon R9 290X will be the best bang for bucks card again. Soon...

Soon... ya, hopefully the 290x can be put to rest in the ewaste pile, along with most current GPUs. Have you seen the mining hashrates for the low wattage Maxwell cards? The rates are impressive, to say the least (NVidia must have be pissed over all the lost sales).Really looking forward to the next generation 20nm GPU's out of TSCM. The successors to the Radeon 7970/280x or GTX 680/770(whatever your preference). And for gaming of course, not mining. We'll all be drooling, looks like double the performance per watt.

 

[southernshark]

What should Bitcoin owners know???Sell your coins while you still can stupid. If you are still holding them at this point, all I can say is WTF???

 

[jredinger]

Correct me if I'm wrong but I took a long hard look at this 'security hole', and I'm pretty sure the 'unsecured information' this article is talking about is the security key itself. A security key can't digitally sign itself. If you can manage to secure the same information with two different keys (no easy feat), which ever one gets confirmed in the network first wins, and the other one is dropped. Either way, the transaction still takes place and is completely secure. The security breach was on Mt. Gox's end, because they didn't have fail-safe's in place to compensate for this 'flaw' - which is actually a rational security decision - IE > it's better to tie the transaction ID to the digital signature, than not - not doing so would create a huge potential security hole. This isn't some simple bug that needs to be patched that's been known since 2011. It's not a bug that's easy to abuse, and the bitcoin community IS working on the problem. But Mt. Gox didn't have to lose a dime if they only had the proper security measures in place, and that's why some members of the community have said that they deserved to go down. For perspective, Mt. Gox's security would have to have been worse than a bank accepting five one dollar bills as $100, because the customer claimed they were $20's after the teller had already processed the transaction.People try and scam banks all the time. Not being prepared to catch someone in such an obvious and common scam is just plain negligent and stupid.

 

[24oz]

This sounds like a big scam.

 

[teknic111]

Here is what bitcoin owners need to know... DO NOT LEAVE YOUR BITCOINS OR FIAT ON ANY EXCHANGE!