Topic: MtGox withdrawal delays [Gathering] - page 247. (Read 908613 times)

36 hours now and my very large BTC withdrawal is not on the blockchain... wtf... techsupport is on weekend mode. Been scouring IRC for MagicalTux.

Since you asked...
Resellers of our Bitcoin Specie have been getting 30%+ more USD than they pay in Bitcoin.
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?&_nkw=bitcoin+silver+MSRP what they sell for
http://coldhardca.sh/BitColdHardCash/Rate what they buy for

This is not true.   I received an EUR transfer myself on Thursday, and domestic JPY is pretty fast.  USD transfers are either extremely delayed or very expensive.

Unless you want to sell them for EUR or JPY and withdraw the fiat, of course.  You will get much more for your bitcoins at MtGox than almost anywhere else.  Or trade, of course.  I made a pretty sum myself yesterday.

The conspiracy theories run high here.

There is a bug here, and "network congestion" is in fact not a bad way to put it without going through the whole technical explanation.  Remember that MtGox don't use bitcoind to process bitcoin transactions other than for block validation.  It just doesn't scale to the amount of addresses they have (primarily) and transactions they have to keep track of.

Sometimes transactions take a very long time to confirm.  E.g. due to sending a small transaction without fees (user error), or (the BUG) trying to use a coinbase transaction with less than 100 confirmations.  Sometimes transactions fail to confirm for reasons I can't explain either.  You can get all og MtGox's unconfirmed transactions which are at least 2 hours old from the URL below, and use it to verify my claims.  It is updated every 20 minutes: https://data.mtgox.com/api/0/bitcoin_tx.php

When a transaction isn't confirmed after ~24 hours, MtGox tries to solve it by issuing a high fee transaction to itself where it spends one or more of the inputs of the unconfirmed transaction.  This will invalidate the unconfirmed transaction.  When the invalidating transaction has 6 confirmations, MtGox will issue a new transaction for the withdrawal, and this usually confirms at once.  But due to the coinbase bug, this may also be a troublesome transaction.  (The reason why support will ask you to wait 24 hours.)

Usually the list of unconfirmed transactions is short (~100 micropayment transactions with no fees).  This is rebroadcasted in longish intervals, but a rebroadcast doesn't help much because miners don't even forward those transactions with no fees.  Much less mine them.  When the list get very long, this becomes a bottleneck ("network congestion").  And it does for several reasons.  The main reason is the coinbase bug (known for a long time, and they should rally get this fixed), which leads to cancellation transactions, and when the cancellation transaction doesn't confirm, there will be another, etc.

So this is just a bug, not a form of capital controls.  AFAIK everyone have received their BTC withdrawal eventually.  But I am sure you conspiracy theorists won't let facts affect you.

On the other hand it is Sunday today.  Sunday is MagicalTux's coding day.  Let's hope fixing this bug is on top of his TODO list.

I was expecting this reply, and I kind of agree that we can't apply exact real world standards at this time, but even if we apply universally accepted shady companies standards, this is getting a bit out of hands.

The thing is, people do not appear to realize that MtGox is not an actual real world currency or commodity exchange. And neither is any other bitcoin exchange. We can't apply real world standards to them.

The bitcoin exchanges are small, shady companies providing trading platforms for an experimental cryptocurrency. Nothing more.

As a former prop trader & derivatives marketmaker at one of the big firms I can only agree with the comments above, which sums up all you need to know, everything else in this topic is just noise. I am still watching this topic for the entertainment value.

Manipulating the availability of fiat or BTC in various marketplaces.  I am sure that there are people who will take a temporary loss with the hope of engineering a situation which will produce an even bigger pay-off at a later time (else there would be no market manipulation which I believe laughable.)

It occurred to me some time back that someone with a lot of BTC to play around with could put in a lot of bids.  Then they could start selling.  The spot price would go down, but a lot of the coins would just end up being sold to themselves.  Yes there would be a hit in terms of exchange fees, but it could probably be made up in other ways if one could anticipate a sharp downward push on the spot price (as an example.)  Of course if one is selling to themselves to a significant degree then one maintains their BTC position accordingly (if that is important to them.)

How much an exchange of Mt. Gox's size could be damaged by systematic and targeted manipulation games is unknown.  Perhaps not at all but it would not surprise me if a coalition of like minded parties could team up to cause headaches if they chose to attempt it.  At least in this nascent Bitcoin ecosystem.

One thing that is observable is that somehow a startlingly wide gap has opened between Mt. Gox and other exchanges and that the distortions they have created have had a notable impact on the way customers use and feel about Mt. Gox as an organization.  Admittedly there is an chicken/egg argument to be made here though.

It is a valid and powerful technique in reaching and understanding of the world to consider as many hypotheses as one can dream up, then knock out one which fail to match observations.  In fact it a big part of why science has progressed so quickly after the age of enlightenment.

There is no shame whatsoever in considering a hypothesis which turns out to be incorrect.  Just the opposite really.  There is much shame in failing to consider a hypothesis because it conflicts with some sort of orthodoxy, dictate, or underlying desire for something to be a certain way.

I actually considered your hypothesis that Mt. Gox was created by E.T.  It to a fraction of a second of light work.  While I don't rule out the possibility, it is not a very productive avenue for analysis for a variety of reasons.

This was not my experience.  I tried to withdraw around $5,500 to my Hong Kong bank account with no luck.  After 6-7 weeks I gave up.

Exactly.  I get the impression that many people in the Bitcoin world have no clue what happens when a real broker defaults on their obligations. They're effectively out of business within hours, as other brokers won't deal with them, and they're closed down within days.

My withdrawal came in and it was just under 24 hours. They stated 1-24 hours in the email.

If it comes down to it I will have to do similar tactics. My large withdrawal is still in limbo and not anywhere on the blockchain after 24 hours.

MtGox worked well during the two last turbulent sell-offs, the silk road event and the debt ceiling cancellation event. High volume and no lag.

The spread between MtGox and Bitstamp has been rather constant the last weeks, indicating that someone has found an arbitration channel to another exchange. The spread has in fact narrowed, it was 10% two weeks ago, now it is 8% most of the time. The arbitrageur has become more efficient or more people have joined the business, pressing the profit.

They have the obvious bank transfer problems, they have tightened the requirements for bitcoin transfers which is bad, they are pressed on support and communicate too little, but otherwise they seem to have a slick system and high trust, and is probably the exchange that has the most coins and fiat for sale on or off the order book.

I am not worried.

Just some more experience points to add to the history here:

1 requested $USD withdrawal Sept 4, periodically ask about its status, always get the 'slight delay' excuse email, sometimes they
mention the 5% fee for 'urgent' withdrawals.

2 subsequently reequested more $USD withdrawn, but once I realized it wasn't going to happen, cancelled that and saw my $USD balance restored within hours

As I understand, withdrawals to asian banks are still happening promptly?  If so, what does it take to create a foreign bank account to receive the withdrawn funds (in yuan) ?   

3: Made several BTC withdraw requests last night and got errors saying 'invalid btc address'... the addresses were valid though - when I tried the same one later, it succeeded.

5: Made BTC withdrawal at 10:30AM EST, it's still not received 11 hours later.  Emailed support who just said to wait 24 hours.

6: Made 2 more BTC withdrawals just now, both completed within several minutes.


What I'd like at this point is to find something I can buy and sell, or at least overpay for.... for example, overpay a utility bill in BTC, but get the balance refunded as $USD.   Has anyone found anything to purchase with BTC which can be resold or refunded at the same rate to USd?

lol

i m doing the same but in opposite direction
lol

jesus please stop with all the conspiracies, what's next mtgox was created by e.t.? 

it's simple, you cant withdraw fiat currency out of mtgox, so only way for people to get money out is to buy bitcoins and transfer it out. And for the bitcoin holders no point for them to sell on mtgox since they cant get money out, so they just transfer bitcoins out and sell elsewhere.  As more and more people realize this, the bid and sell side will continue to diverge, eventually end up in a panic.

an exchange cannot function if you cant get your money out. In the real world, if i went to any of the broker-dealer like interactive brokers or goldman sachs prop trading, and i cant wire out my money in the standard 24-48 hour window, major panic ensues and it will be on cnbc front page.

only reason noone gives a shit about mtgox taking months to wire money out is most have no clue, but now even their bitcoin is getting delayed by days, which is a sure sign of liquidity problems. 

Last time i will say this - get your bitcoins out of mtgox, it's just not worth the risk to leave it in there - there is no reward only risk.

ps: i got my initial 8 btc out finally after 3+ days.  I wrote another nasty email to them pretty much stating they are full of shit and i want my bitcoins or i will report them to the sesc, then a few hours later i got a reply saying in short oh the bitcoin was already transferred you made a mistake, i look up my block address timestamp and it was literally a few mins before the email was sent lol, i bet they manually did something to get the coins out then acted all innocent in the email.

funny stuff...

Please elaborate on the various liquidity events.

Oh, thank heavens!  I just transferred all of the BTC that I own back to Mt. Gox for safe storage.  And I wired the balance of my checking acount there as well.  Thx a million for the info!

Hey guys, sturtle already explained you that there is no stampede/bank run, MtGox made shiiiiiitloads of money and can cover any hole, the problem is just that they are so successful and their volume is so freaking high that they are overwhelming both the traditional financial system and the Bitcoin network, that's all