Topic: MtGox withdrawal delays [Gathering] - page 277. (Read 908613 times)

has anyone gone to the IRC chat channel to ask what is current status?

are you guys able to get your bitcoins out? or are you guys waiting for that too?

Does that require actually flying to japan?

When was the last time someone received a manual 5% fee withdrawal?

I think this is the truth.  I think the 10% risk premium for Mt. Gox cash is greatly underestimated.  This will end badly and those stating here they are not concerned will be left holding the bag when the shit hits the fan, the value of Mt. Gox USD really plummets and they lose a lot more than they current have.

since I can only speak for myself personally:

- withdrawal requested as international wire to US on 6/11/2013
- multiple requests for status, all with lame responses.
- MtGox CS actually suggested canceling request
- canceled 9/13/2013 - USD returned to MtGox account.
- immediately bought BTC and withdrew it

In my opinion, MtGox has turned into an accidental Ponzi scheme, and they no longer have cash to fund withdrawals. Get out while you can.

Not very many businesses do not 'take and hold customer money.'

Regardless of whether or not Mt. Gox should be required to obtain reasonable certifications for the business that they are engaged in, there is no legitimate reason to appropriate money which ultimately belongs to their customers.  If this was a state sponsored event, I expect that the state will disgorge the money eventually.  If Peter Vessenes spent the money on hookers and blow, I expect that he will end up being incarcerated.  Again, I look forward to doing my part to see that that happens.

That's wishful thinking. Of course they're a financial institution. They take deposits and hold customer money. (And don't pay it back when they should.) If they're lucky, the FSA will just consider them a payment services firm. Those rules aren't hard to comply with, although there's a transaction size limit (1 million yen). If they're not lucky, the FSA will treat them as an unlicensed broker or an unlicensed bank.

In the US (where Mt. Gox does have a legal presence, in Delaware), they're probably a broker/dealer, and need to qualify as a broker/dealer under US law to deal with US customers. That means SEC registration, audits, insurance, capital requirements, and background checks. Read "Who is a broker" from the SEC.

which article?

Nice article on WIRED. Getting this out in the open with figures and court documents for all to view, makes this situation shrink to manageable levels of drama. Good for everyone, nicely done!

To answer your question, 'sufficient duration' is currently a quarter or two for me, but it depends more on how interesting the problem is to me relative to other unrelated adventures.

'Getting my money back' is not the driving force.  Any money I put on anything Bitcoin related is considered a likely full loss by me and certainly something I can live without.  That said, I don't like to get fucked.  If the government and/or Peter Vessenes have stolen from Mt. Gox and that is the reason Mt. Gox is not paying me promptly, these parties are effectively stealing from me and I'll be interested in extracting revenge.

As I've said before, the attacks which Mt. Gox has suffered have resulted in my placing a higher degree of confidence in them and led me to believe that they are a net positive in the Bitcoin ecosystem.  Not insofar as that I won't lose money through them, but more that it provides evidence that Mt. Gox is NOT fully in bed with surveillance apparatus and part of a general state sponsored honeypot operation.

The tag-team efforts of the US legal system, financial system, and Coinlabs makes me suspicious that playing a role in a honeypot effort was Coinlabs game, and I'm glad that Mt. Gox deferred from handing their books (sensitive customer data) off to Coinlabs and will be interested to see more as this situation evolves.  Back to my initial point, I would be even more glad if I could provoke some insight into the goings on on the basis of my financial loss.  I'm due to write my first note to Mt. Gox and still struggling to figure out the best questions to ask geared toward accumulating information needed to eventually probe various entities further.

I think you are wrong.  MtGox isn't a financial insistitution, and aren't registered under Japan Financial Services Agency.  There is no category for companies like MtGox.  Only banks and other companies involved in payment services, financial instruments, insurance, etc, are.

Wired article on the issue: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/09/mt-gox/

Annoying colour removed.

Counterexample: I tried using a bank which use Citibank as intermediate for SEPA transfers to transfer money to Intersango.  I was told by the bank they couldn't transfer money to Intersango beacause Citibank wouldn't allow it.  I left the bank immediately of course, and I never had any trouble transferring money to Intersango from other banks.  Since my customer relations with this bank ended after one day, I never got the chance to test it for transfers to MtGox. MtGox use the same bank in Poland that Intersango uses.

Why is that in any way obvious?  Have you read the horror stories about Japanese banks on this forum?

And the basis for your claims is?  How come EUR and JPY withdrawals work if MtGox are broke?  5 million is just a part of their profit this year, and they have about 14 million USD in visible bids in the order book.  Even if the 5 million USD which CoinLab and Peter Vessenes stole are lost, they are still only have about 2 million USD to cover (assuming their extra legal costs are less than a million USD, which they should be prior to meeting in court).  And they wouldn't need capital controls to keep 2 millions USD of deposits.  MtGox is still the only exchange where you can spend 2 million USD on BTC without moving the price very much.

If you have been waiting for one SEPA withdrawal from june, you are either hiding something (e.g. that you made several withdrawals and have received them one by one 20 days apart), or there was something wrong with your transfer.  What did support tell you? 

I don't think either that MTGOX will be facing bankruptcy anytime soon, they conquered much worse hardship. Still this is a pretty f*cked up situation

Mt. Gox does have the obligation to segregate customer funds and have 100% of them on deposit under the Japan Payment Services Act, or guaranteed by a bank. It's appropriate to ask the Japan Financial Services Agency to audit Mt. Gox.

Take a look at how Western Union Money Transfer operates in Japan:

• "Western Union have signed and executed a Guarantee Agreement with the Royal Bank of Scotland (Japan Branch) to ensure that all users of the Western Union Money Transfer service in Japan are protected by the Performance Protection Funds contained in Article 44 of the Money Transfer Business Act."
• "The standard time for completing a money transfer transaction is approximately 10 minutes".
  
• "Western Union seek to resolve all claims related to the Money Transfer process as soon as we can. In case of dis-satisfaction, consumers may contact Japan Payment Service Association with claims and request for Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR). Japan Payment Service Association may introduce details of ADR. Please contact 03-3219-0628. The dispute reolution institutions used for this service are: The Tokyo Bar Association: 03-3581-003, The Dai-ichi Tokyo Bar Association: 03-3595-8588 and the Daini Tokyo Bar Association: 03-3581-2249"
  

That's what a legit money transfer company looks like in Japan. Does Mt. Gox look like that?

The "Japan Payment Service Association" is a "self-regulatory association" (like NASDAQ in the US) for the payment services industry. They take complaints about payment service companies. Mt. Gox is supposed to be a member (it's not optional), but I doubt that they are. It's worth raising that issue with the Payment Services Association.

One interesting point of Japanese law is that if a money transfer company goes under, the customers are the first to recover funds; all other creditors then divide up what's left. This is the reverse of US practice, where "unsecured creditors" come last. This also has the implication that creditors of Mt. Gox may be secured creditors, which improves the odds of claims against funds forfeited by Mt. Gox to the US Government.

The point I'm making here is that you don't have to put up with Mt. Gox's excuses. You can apply pressure from several directions and probably get paid.

Lots of massive assumptions here. What you need to understand that if it was a technical issue with a bank, they can't exactly go out on the market and say "hey, who will be our bank" to anyone. Banks don't like bitcoin and those that are willing to host a new bank account for any exchange are likley to ask a lot of questions and also not rush about it. Afaik, Gox are not even close to bankrupt, (far from it).....but anyway, back on topic....