MtGox needs to improve their communications, both privately with customers and publicly to reassure people they are dealing with issues that arise.
For example
http://www.reddit.com/r/MtGox/comments/hy3lc/its_been_a_full_week_wtf_mtgox_crosspost_from/Posted Sunday evening. Describes waiting over a week, with multiple unreplied e-mails, for a dwolla transfer out, including days after the dwolla issue was fixed. There is a reddit reply from MtGox asking for details so they can look into it.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/hxo8z/need_some_advice_with_a_random_deposit_to_my_mt/Describes a $1700 dollar deposit in yen into the bank account of a MtGox member that was not initiated by the account owner.
Apparently fixed after the reddit post, but no indication of any explanation, other than a MtGox reply that someone may have fat fingered a bank account that was coming out in Yen and going to a US bank.
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=14881.0A thread describing btc and transaction history disappearing from a MtGox account. There has been nothing more than an Adam_Gox reply on a reddit post:
http://www.reddit.com/r/MtGox/comments/hxdl8/btc_and_transaction_history_gone_from_my_mtgox/ suggesting a possible scenario denied by the poster. Perhaps this one has also been fixed without any followup.
Then, there are two threads
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=15998.0http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=15984.0on a 432k btc transaction that would seem to be related to MtGox and that occurred just before a MtGox outage.
None of those 432 btc have moved yet:
http://blockexplorer.com/address/1KLahQtqDNAXvrjNyfvgSBtAhwco5ZxLp4I'm not sure what to make of that. If it were a hack, I'd expect them to have been mixed and laundered. If it were MtGox funds being transferred, I'd have expected some of them to be used to redeem bitcoins transferred out. Maybe there are many more than 432K btc in MtGox and this was just one big trader pulling coins out.
There have been multiple instances of MtGox being down in the last few days.
There was this claim of major bugs in the near future with bitcoin:
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=14693.0The discussion seemed to take and dismiss the claim as a bug found in bitcoin or in the blockchain. The tweet was "Bitcoin Prediction: Major bugs in the near future will mess with the 'market'". I'd say those dismissals of the bitcoin protocol were accurate. What if it was a bug in the exchanges? That would mess with the market.
Compare all of this to
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=3089.0Which is an instance of a dictionary attack against MtGox in January. Once it was noticed, it took a very short time for MtGox to indicate that a dictionary attack happened, and there were just two accounts compromised. Plus it was publically stated that at leat one of the accounts received partial restitution. And, note, that this claim was not met with claims of derision and accusations of troll.
This is the way to instill confidence.
I only discovered bitcoins with the slashdot post of a few weeks ago. I started solo mining on 5770 without success until switching to pooled mining. My mining has been shut off at times while my 11 year old son plays video games. If I could sell all of my bitcoins at current prices, I could almost purchase a better graphics card for mining. If I could find a 5850 available, I definitely could.