MPOE-PR - I gotta wonder....did MP get squeezed out?
Nope. They did try (pushing it down as low as 9.5ish), but failed and eventually seem to have given up.
I had some suspicion that MP was one of the larger hands trading at ICBit once GLBSE shutdown.
This was the first time he ever traded there. Pretty sure it's also the last (for the noted reasons).
I also note that MP has a history of establishing risky short positions
This was/is a long position in any case.
and definitely have no more or less recourse in either case against a nefarious exchange operator.
At the very minimum you get MPEx signed receipts, so you can clearly prove what happens, rather than the situation here where the site does something, then the operator comes and brazenly claims that it didn't. Of particular note:
The one thing I find most disturbing about accusations, is that most humans seem to accuse others of those faults, flaws, and outright criminal behavior, that they themselves are guilty of. MPOE-PR, you post about pretty much every other trading related site, in a negative way. I'm starting to wonder how many of your accusations are based in MP's own behavior (and not that of the competing exchange being accused). That notwithstanding, MP's opinion on other exchanges has been pretty well-founded, and predictions of doom have oft been correct. So...................
You know, we
aren't the same person. MP is a boy. I am a girl. MP is a business type. I am mostly a writer. On it goes.
What would you practically have me do? After people lost money by being idiots and ignoring the obvious points (ie, for instance, that
unlike MPEx GLBSE was quite going to screw the issuers exactly the way it did in the end) people didn't draw the conclusion that "we were idiots and should have listened to MPOE-PR" except in the minority. In the majority they became convinced that "Bitcoin finance doesn't work".
We're committed to making BTC finance work. It may be a larger task than anyone anticipates, it may even be impossible to do, though we don't think so. This attitude whereby one just sits idly by while people think that "they have to trade somewhere" and so they trade with Bitcoinica (which, incidentally, it turns out MP knew was going to fail, for the exact reasons that it did; he discussed this privately with people who actually have money, and I never said anything publicly) and then trade with some ridiculous proposition where some anonymous "Raphael" re-uses that provedly-broken code without even bothering to secure permission, and then they trade with bucket shops like this and on and on, and then they lose on "everything they tried" (cause obviously they only try the things made to be "easy", cause obviously they can't be arsed to use the things made to work because
bla bla) and so conclude that "oh, you can't invest in Bitcoins"
has to be countered by something.
Yes, we seem to be some of the very few who happen to give two shits. This is easily explained: we do in fact have a vested interest in making BTC finance work. That's fine. But I'd like to revisit a point from an otherwise amply ignored article, just like everything else sensible is ignored around here in favor of hollow groupthink bullshit:
When a small majority* of participants behave irresponsibly however the net result is not just pain to their own fortunes, but pain spread across the board. All of a sudden you have to be very intelligent, and very experienced, and very well informed to manage to keep your money safe, and often enough even that's not going to suffice.
You vote with your BTC. This point has to be understood very, very clearly. If you give your BTC away to scams "because it's easy" instead of investing in sites that actually work
you are creating the very environment of perpetual scams, economical and financial irrelevance and ultimately failure.
Having Bitcoins first and foremost means you're responsible for them.
