I remember MtGox being hacked, where coins were sold down to 0.01 or whatever value. After that everything was shut down, and user had to reclaim their accounts after a fairly long waiting period. MtGox came through.
Anybody remember how long time it took? I remember the deadline for the reclaiming system being constantly pushed, and people being quite angry.
Then, I think it was in April 2013 that MtGox halted all trading, because their platform could no longer take the volume of trades, and there was more down time.
But to sum up, does anyone have a timeline of MtGox issues and how long it took for MtGox to resolve these issues?
My point being that MtGox have had a lot of problems, but always came through in the end. Many people are angry, and rightfully so, but isn't it better that they actually come through in the end and everything goes back to 'normal' than the alternative of shutting down operations?
One could say many things about their CEO Karpeles, but surely, he doesn't engage in the flame-fest that's currently taking place, that would not be productive. Also, the enormous amount of hate that is directed towards his person does not help any way or another, although much of it is funny, I see also some people are sending threats. While some might think that's warranted, I think all this noise, threats, accusations and complaints only makes him withdraw from public light, and shielding himself more.
Everything should've been handled completely differently, experts should've been flown in and restoring btc withdrawals should be #1 priority, and the market should've gotten at least day by day updates about the situation. Not updating the public, and just letting everyone out of the loop surely only contributes to more anger, hate, hostility, distrust and panic.
But the bottom line being that perhaps Mark is not the person cut out to run such a business, so he might be well meaning, but he's just different and lack a few social antennas, after all he's a complete geek, and many geeks are quite weird, and doesn't know much about business administration.
I'm also wondering if Gonzague Gay-Bouchery is a submissive friend of Mark, although he's the manager of business development at Mtgox, maybe he just doesn't have the necessary level of authority to make changes, or maybe he also is quite inept at dealing with the public.
However in one
interview the 10th he states:
After waiting for several hours, CoinSearcher was greeted by Gonzague Gay-Bouchery, Mt Gox's manager of business development, who said the exchange was trying to fix the technical issues and did not have a liquidity problem - he added that users' coins were safe, with many held in 'cold storage' on computer not connected to the internet.
This is now 15 days ago, and one would think that the issues should've been resolved by now, and any serious financial institution would have a team of devs working over time to make this happen, and also update the customers about the progress, and give estimated timelines.
But as it is mentioned elsewhere, how much work does this update entail for MtGox - some dev. that was interviewed by them claimed that they didn't have a proper testing enviroment until recently. [citation needed] So they might struggle on many level - and how much work is it that needs to be done? There's the trading engine, web interface, database, custom bitcoind implementation and possibly other parts we don't know much about. So if this code is old, and it haven't been touched for a while, and it might not even be well documented, and before one can actually start writing new code, the old code needs to be understood, and a test environment needs to be set up, and in addition Mark (if he's the only coder) needs to understand exactly how to fix this, all of this takes time.
I've seen the web-interface of MtGox display some polish text recently when logging in with english language, so perhaps he has some polish coders on the team as well?
But the point being is that if it's only Mark doing this, everything will be really slow. And in addition to the stuff above, also sorting out the accounting mess from the malleability attack has to be sorted out manually, and since Mark have a hard time trusting anyone, perhaps he's doing that as well.
So all in all, maybe Mark just have this gigantic stockpile of issues and softwareproblems that he needs to sort out, and if he's working on all this alone (esp. the sensitive parts of MtGox), he's pretty swamped, and then it's understandable that things becomes even slower when he's bugged by people outside his office and perhaps he even receives death threats.
There's been reports of people becoming verified and SEPA's going through the last week. So if MtGox really was insolvent, why would they at all bother with sending out money to customers, and why would they bother with verifying customers? Would they not ignore doing all of that?
From the perspective of any 'normal' person, the way MtGox does business is completely unacceptable, but people are quite different, and what's unacceptable for some people, are just normal business for other people. So while being in a position in a company where certain things are required from you, it's possible to fire you if you don't keep up. Upper management or the board, or both, will have your head served on a platter.
Being the owner of a business however, things are quite different. As long as you stay in business, you can do almost anything, and there's nobody above you that will kick your ass out of the office, no matter how badly you treat your customers. I know a long range of businesses where managers and owners are outright assholes, and doesn't do business in an ethical way, and they constantly have arguments and runins with disgruntled customers. But somehow, many of these businesses are still around. It seems as if you provide a service that people need, and the way you serve the customers is not so bad that the majority will leave, then they will just stick around.
And people forget quite easily. When withdrawals resume, most people will be happy to use MtGox again, and in a couple of weeks all the anger and rage will have subsided. And people will continue to use it because of their liquidity and multi-currency orderbook.
The majority of people never looks longer than their own nose, something gone wrong today? OMG, it's the end of the world. A string of bad news, and surely MtGox will close shop, there' really is no alternative...
I understand people are mightily angry, but MtGox has come through before, and they've always had delays no matter what they've been doing, so don't discount the possibility that this might be the case again, and that they're just really really bad at public relations. Perhaps it's part of the french mindset? Generalizations are never good, but I've seen my share of arrogant french men, and the moment you doubt them, you're the enemy, so perhaps we're all 'idiots' in their mind, because everything is actually 100% ok, because they said so. And that's all they have to say about that.
Not all people are able to put themselves in the shoes of others, or doesn't even care about the feelings of others, they just do whatever that they do, and that's it.
The protester outside the MtGox HQ confronting Mark, did not at all point a good picture of Mark and MtGox, as anyone concerned with their business should've seized up the situation and done the best out of it. But from Mark's viewpoint, this might just be an annoyance, and he might both be scared and/or inconvenienced and though mostly of how he could get away from that situation. That might be a human reaction, and many people react in a certain way when confronted, and does not behave professionally. If a random person approaches you on the street, or in front of your office, most people would be put off by this and try to get away. Who's this person? Can he/she become violent? Why's this person bothering me?
I've seen it time and time again, people taking things personally and don't acting professionally, even though they have a socalled 'professional' position. Being professional is not only about acting professional when you're set up for a TV interview or having a scheduled meeting, but also when unforeseen things happens, even things that are not very comfortable or pleasant. But most people do not like unpleasant things, so they'd rather try to avoid it.
It's so easy to sit outside and judge and criticize, but MtGox might just happen to be hugely incompetent at running such a business, and are constantly backlogged with anything they do.
But we must also remember that they took over bitomat.pl when they lost all their funds, and took over their customers, and their business. Funds were reinstated to all affected customers by MtGox afaik. It's also my genuine impression that Mark believes in bitcoin, and want bitcoin to succeed.
What he's probably at fault at is to be able to scale up, delegate work, hire the right people, and focusing on the most important tasks. I know a few people that has the same personality type, and they always do things their own way, they don't change. And when you suggest changes and alternative ways of doing stuff, they usually don't even listen much to you, because they know best themselves, and even if there's a choir of people screaming at them that a certain way of doing something is wrong, they won't accept that as the truth, after all, they know best, and everybody else must be wrong. The art of self reflection and self insight, it's something that many do not have.
And a lot of these people who have these character traits, if you attack them, they will not deal with you in a professional way, but they will retract, make themselves hard to reach and stop communicating. They might even think that because of all the anger and criticism they receive the attackers don't even deserve to be kept in the loop, they'll know when they get to know kinda attitude.
While most customers do not have anything against Mark personally, all they want is to have the flow of fiat and btc working well. That's all any customer is interested in. So when he fails to deliver this, that's when people start with
ad hominem attacks, and all sorts of belitteling of his person. Yes, he's probably a person that doesn't work out much, if anything, and he might be a person that does like his frappucino, and he should probably have less of that.. But all of that is his personal choice, and he might be very much personally offended by all the hate and anger directed towards his person online.
There's however nothing else to expect, such is the online audience, but I think those throwing the hammer at him perhaps could relax a little bit, and rather try to criticize the way he and MtGox does business rather than delivering those low blows.
While a lot of important individuals in the bitcoin community have criticized Mark and MtGox, you won't see people like Gavin, Hearn, Garzik and Antonopoulos make jokes about his looks, behaviour or eating habbits.
While being a bit funny, remember that all of this probably just adds to the stress Mark is enduring, and most likely is not constructive in resolving the current bad situation.
While I agree that the way Mtgox handles everything is quite unacceptable, I think that the current mob mentality is getting a bit out of hand. I saw someone call for collecting funds so that Marks face could be punched. While a lot of you maybe think that's funny, it's quite immature, and does not add constructively to the current situation.
I think the way to resolve this would be for those that have direct communication with Mark, to approach him in a positive and patient way, and to see if there's anything they could help him with. He will probably reject any offers of help, but I don't think a helper should give up at that point, for instance, Jon Matonis, or any other person, from the Bitcoin Foundation, heck, even perhaps Gavin could fly to Tokoyo, and then sit down with Mark, and in a diplomatic, patient, positive and constructive way gain his trust and aid in fixing MtGox. While this might be a bit unorthodox, and MtGox is a commercial company, and an independent commercial entity, it's still all about humans - it's about the users of MtGox that wants to use the exchange, and it's about the owners of MtGox. It's in everybody's interest to work this out, so everything can resume to 'normal'.
So many are screaming about MtGox being insolvent, and this being the end of MtGox, being the end of Bitcoin and so on. Have you people actually been around for a while? Have you seen all the stuff that have actually happened in the bitcoin world, and so much shit and negative press that bitcoin has taken? The Bitcoinica debacle, Pireat40, intersango, lots of exchanges dying, hacks, scams, frauds... At one point there was something happening almost weekly that brought bad press to bitcoin.
Although there's now a big problem with MtGox, things are turning to the upside, more and more businesses are accepting bitcoin, services are built and so on. And because this is an experiment we all want to succeed, I ask everybody to think twice before they engage in short-sighted mockery, and rather try to stay constructive and see what they can do to contribute positively to the community. None of us are saints, and we will occasionally slip up, but let' try to keep everything to a higher standard.
Again, this is not a defense of MtGox, it's just an attempt to trying to have a more realistic look at the situation. While many people try to stir up the panic, I don't think there's a reason to panic!
While writing this, I see trading has been disabled. This might just be MtGox reinstating btc withdrawals, or it might be that they want to 'cool down' the market. Surely very late for that, but with MtGox you never know.
