Dear Bitcoin Community,
In the past several days many of you have expressed some sincere and honest worries when it comes to withdrawing funds from Mt.Gox. Some concerns have even arisen that we are on the verge of collapse and might ultimately bring Bitcoin down with us.
A lot has happened in the past few months and many formerly reliable and trustworthy exchanges and trading platforms have abruptly ceased business leaving many of you in the dark and/or with yet to be returned funds. We can understand the concerns that our customers might have given the current environment in Bitcoin.
Please remember that Mt.Gox is one of the oldest Bitcoins exchanges, we have suffered setbacks many times in our history and we have always been a highly visible target for criminal elements and governments due to our large share of the market. However, regardless of our past problems and recent issues with money delays, we are still alive, and still pushing things forward to make sure that one day Bitcon will no longer be seen as a fringe element but as a real alternative to fiat currencies.
We would like to clarify the issues which are currently causing the most concern to our users.
1. What’s going on?Some US Dollar withdrawals are taking too long to be processed.
2. Who’s affected by this problem?
People using Dwolla for their withdrawals, along with 5% of US Dollar wire transfers which is an unfortunate flow-on effect.
3. How long does it takes to get my funds on Dwolla once I initiate a withdrawal?
At this time we are seeing around a 7 day delay in Dwolla withdrawals under $1,000 USD. These withdrawals are set with the highest priority in the withdrawal Queue.
However, any withdrawal more than two weeks old will from this point forward will be moved to the top of the queue and processed as a priority before other withdraws.
4. Why?As you may know by now, Dwolla made a drastic change in their TOS for the good of their company and in order to protect both their interest and their clients.
Their new TOS is, like many other Dwolla clients, affecting us, and as for today, we are still waiting for Dwolla to give us the appropriate clearance to continue working with them.
Since we do not have a clear answer from Dwolla, we pro-actively decided to put a new AML policy in place for people willing to use their service, as well as carefully monitor funds left on their services in order to limit any potential loss in case Dwolla suddenly decides to no longer do business with us. This decision was made primarily to safeguard our customers' funds.
5. Are other withdrawal methods affected?
International wires in non-USD currencies and SEPA withdrawals are not affected, they are operating normally. Please note that roughly 5% of our USD wire transfers are affected, but by and large are being processed normally.
6. Any numbers?
Last month in May we processed 2,459 USD Dwolla withdrawals for a total of 2.17 million USD.
The number of delayed withdrawals are 8.54% of the total USD withdrawals and represent 13.25% of the 2.17 million USD through Dwolla.
7. Is Mt.Gox insolvent?
We want to reassure everyone that we are not insolvent and the number of withdrawals touched by this “slowdown” is a minority of our total withdrawals. We invite users who are concerned to review our transparency document here:
https://mtgox.com/press_release_20120201.html An updated one will be made available as soon as we are able which should allay any fears that we could possibly be insolvent.
Disclaimer: Even if the above numbers for affected withdrawals are in the minority compared to what we handle every single month, this is does not mean that we are ignoring our users affected by this problem or ignoring the problem all together. We are working as we speak on several solutions but unfortunately we are not in a position to discuss the details of these solutions as yet. ConclusionWe are fully aware of the delays for some withdrawals and we are working on fixing this issue as we speak as well as working with other Bitcoin partners to find other alternatives.
Mt.Gox is still solvent and is not going into bankruptcy anytime soon.
Can you trust us? As we stated earlier... Mt.Gox is one of the oldest Bitcoin Exchanges and despite all that happened since its creation, Mt.Gox is still the leading Bitcoin Exchange, and still going while many of our respected and hard working colleague exchanges and trading platform collapsed.