Topic: MtGox is bitcoins weakest link!!!!!! (Read 7064 times)

That's a good point. I don't think there's any good way to measure these kinds of off-exchange transactions. Perhaps some of the larger person-to-person traders could shed some light on the size of these markets? If you were to take the off-exchange transactions into account, Mt.Gox would probably have a much smaller percentage of bitcoin trade.

The blockchain got forked because of a db issue between 0.7 and 0.8 clients.  https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/alert-chain-fork-caused-by-pre-08-clients-dealing-badly-with-large-blocks-152030

Gox is Goxed again.

LocalBitcoins.com

Check out CampBX if your sick of Mt.Gox, They have a simple easy to use site that unlike Mt.Gox doesn't mysteriously lock up when the price of BTC starts to tank.

Sign up here using this referral link - https://campbx.com/register.php?r=x855P0x3G72 so i can get some coin for promoting them.

Thanks.  So that is in currency trade and excludes exchanges not listed.  How do we get a handle on how much btc-fiat exchange is going on outside of those listed exchanges?  About half of my own bitcoin came from personal exchanges, though it's not much.

Thanks... the OP does not seem to have come back yet.


He said 80% and your's is just five points away, so.... two people's testimony is a bad sign. Something should
change.

I think you were aiming that question at me.



The short term is a bit on hold at the moment while I am making money in other places,
but it was important to show bitcoin users that better things:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=145389.0;all

are on the way.


The "long term" as you put it is inevitable. I believe bitcoin markets need to match their
product, especially to avoid what happens with regular centralized markets, where they
get stolen from by thieves. A decentralized market(s) does away with that problem.
There will be no big piles of money in the decentralized markets and therefore very little
incentive to hack it.

You can work out roughly what percentage of bitcoin trading is happening through Mt.Gox by looking at the volumes of the different exchanges listed at www.bitcoincharts.com/markets. In the last 30 days, roughly 2.1 M bitcoins have been traded through Mt.Gox, and roughly 2.8 M have been traded through all of the exchanges combined.  So Mt.Gox has about 75% of the market.

SgtSpike nailed it. All the other exchanges face 2 pretty huge problems IMHO :
* volume. Or to be precise, lack of. One can always find buyers or sellers on MtGox.
* trust. It's still the wild, wild west out there. Mtgox won't just disappear overnight, others no one is sure.

Over the years I tried all those :
Tradehill : was pretty good, but it closed down.
Bitcoin7 : got hacked. Poor volume. Lost 5 BTC.
World Bitcoin Exchance : was very nice to use but owner ran away. Was lucky to withdraw on time.
CryptoXChange : turned out to be a scam. Lost a fair bit.

...I'll stay with mtgox for now

So how is the short term future looking for the "GDI Bitcoin Project"? Long term future?

Thanks...

I have to make the plugin myself or find a PHP programmer who enjoys working for passive income. It runs itself after that. It wont take long.

I actually read that post a while ago and I love the idea especially because both sources of income are so reliable.  How soon will it be launched and ready to go?  I'm on board   

What if:

A free plugin could be downloaded to any site and shown across the world for a sale or trade of bitcoin? What if the system could actually make money for the users, similar to direct marketing?

1. fully decentralization is a myth, "a brain is always needed to control a body"
2. digital coins are the best internet product so far after worldwide communication

How do you get 80%?  Is there a well-defined set of bitcoin addresses that belong to MtGox so that we can compute the ratio of the value of transactions involving them to the value of all transactions?

I think you mean 80% of the bitcoin trade in currencies, perhaps even just the pound.  The ability to convert between bitcoin and your local fiat currency is becoming less and less important.  Sell silver, gold, copper, services, food, whatever you want for bitcoin. And sell bitcoin for all those other things.  I doubt very much that MtGox has 80% of that trade.  Closer to 0, I imagine.

We, as the bitcoin community, have the opportunity to utterly destroy the idea of fiat currency.  Fiat currency isn't something you can do without large amounts of coercion and deceit.  The way we destroy it is by trusting math instead of authority.  We are brainwashed into measuring value with fiat currencies, but value is subjective and underpins our cooperative human nature:  You have something that is more valuable to me than something I have, and I have something more valuable to you than something you have.  They are the same two things (whether time, stuff, trust, reputation, notoriety, or whatever), so we're both better off trading them.  We need to unlock our lips from around the nipple of fiat currency and embrace the underlying fact that we all have different values and those differences make us valuable to each other if we can trade.  Bitcoin makes this possible through the Internet because it's public and timestamped.

+1 I agree with General Spike for once. 

Speculators go where the volume is. It's the easiest and most lucrative place to separate amateur "investors" from their money. It's like trying to catch salmon during their run up the river, rather than trying to catch them in the ocean.

Plus, for the big pump-and-dump artists, they can control the reference exchange rate for the entire Bitcoin world there.

This is the "good" MtG now. For those who remember, it was a real POS with dark pools (to make things easier for the pump-and-dump brigade) in 2010-11, before the 611 crash and the Karpeles era. 

I can just see it now Pound MY ASS! COIN!!  you know like buttcoin right ?

Not really.  Day traders are going to trade on the exchange with the consistently lowest spread.  Because MtGox is the most used exchange, it'll have the lowest spread.  And because it has the lowest spread, it is the most used exchange.

Exchanges already exist with fees below MtGox, but they aren't as successful, because they all have various problems.  Bitfloor was hacked and not smart with security.  Coinbase has issues with downtime.  Most other exchanges aren't available for one particular main currency or another - MtGox has the most world-wide currencies supported AFAIK.

MtGox isn't nearly as good as it could be, but nothing better has yet presented itself.