Topic: MtGox withdrawal delays [Gathering] - page 284. (Read 908775 times)

It is close to two months later since I decided to do what David suggests in his post above.

From what I can tell not much has changed in those two months (now nearly 3 months since withdrawals were first suspended in mid June).

At what point do you say to yourself ...."that is long enough, I want out of gox (buy bitcoins)"?.

Correct. I was a fan of MtGox for a long time, but I have completely stopped using them until they are fully back to normal.

Anyone who loses fiat or btc if MtGox goes down cannot possibly cry on this forum because they have had ample warning with hundreds of posts on bitcointalk, facebook, reddit and elsewhere for months. MtGox is in a fight for survival against the DHS/Fincen/bankster complex and no one knows the final result.

I think the safe and simple solution for now until MTGOX sorts out their issues or makes a definitive statement as to the real reason for the delays is to cash out your USD position at MTGOX for BTC and move the BTC back to your private wallet.

Given the inflated price of BTC at MTGOX, this is most likely what people are doing right now.

You got two contradictory statements there.  Aren't all btc and fiat balances in mtgox and not outside of it?  They are at least 5 million usd short from USA seizures.  Add in legal costs and other costs.  Also if they are insolvent/BK you'd have nothing just like any other business failure and there is no FDIC or SIPC deposit insurance.

that's great background.

the only way that MtGox will change their behavior would be if most customers would leave them completely, trading volume falls below 1000 and then 100 BTC per day...
but as long as so many people keep their funds there, they can carry on with this nontransparent communication

I just posed this question to MTGOX. I will either get a cogent answer, a form answer or the vengeful scorn or MTGOX. I hope they are forthcoming - Whatever the reply is I will update you to what I find out.

"I run a legal Blog (BTCLAG.org) and a lot of my readers have asked me what I know about the seemingly extraordinary Lag in getting USD out of MTGOX. I replied to them "I don't know, let me me try it out" So I sold (1) one bitcoin on the 20 of August and transferred the resulting USD balance to my confirmed US checking account linked to my MTGOX account. It is now 20 days later. So my question is what is up? I am not a banking expert but wire transfers are all automated through computers so I don't really understand the standing explanation of backup, as it would infer  that the banks are unable to process an increased volume from just your small percentage of transactions, but seamlessly process Billions of other transactions from other sources in just a few days. I have heard whispering of floating cash after your seizure by the US government. There is also eroding consumer confidence due to your alleged two week hiatus to improve USD cash withdrawal times which to many outside observers was merely a cash hold out to compensate for the account confiscation by the US Government. I am actually a big supporter of your service and hope that you can sort these issues out, but the huge price spread for btc on your site as compared to every other exchange would anecdotally indicate that people are cashing out their cash positions and buying and moving BTC to other sites, which is artificially creating a demand bubble on MTGOX for BTC. I humbly suggest that you will need to be more transparent with your situation as the Bitcoin community is a fairly saavy and impatient group as a whole, who will simply move their business elsewhere"

In the real world, there are settlement limits, which range from T+1 (one day after the trade) to T+5, depending on what's being traded.  When a broker/dealer fails to pay up within the time limit (it doesn't matter why) it's called a "failure to deliver", or a "fail".

In the US, fails have to be reported to the SEC, and the data is available. Penalties have to be paid when that happens.

Fails to deliver cash to customers are more serious. That results in a broker being closed down within days. Historically, financial scams come unglued when the scammer fails to deliver.

I traded one Bitcoin three weeks ago and initiated a international money transferred to my bank in the US I have not seen hide nor hair of it

It all just seems like a rather transparent ploy to float cash after the confiscation of their funds

"Indefinite"

I disagree. I do not see anything wrong with aggregate data transparency as other financial institutions do this already.  So, what is your logical rationale for instant death an an exchange providing such figures?  

Some of this information is very sensitive and some is useless.  E.g. oldest withdrawal in the queue.  If you intentionally DDoS the withdrawal queue by doing many small withdrawals instead of one large, you are placed far back in the queue every time a withdrawal is processed.  This is only fair.  Some of this is very market sensitive.  E.g. total deposits.  (Which are in many different currencies, btw, not just USD.)  They should not publish this, and if they did it would mean instant death as an exchange.  Large investors must depend on MtGox not publishing those numbers.  MtGox has very a very strict privacy policy as well.  It is important to ensure that no private information can leak out.  I can't see any other exchanges publish those numbers either.

The only important number to most people is how long they have to wait for their money if they withdraw today, and how the queue is organized.  I have provided the know figures in this thread.  It is collected from various sources, and I wish MtGox would make similar information available.

If Mt. Gox provided honest figures, the financial press would notice and Mt. Gox would go out of business.

If they provided real performance numbers:
 - Total USD, EUR, JPY, GBP withdrawals requested by customers and not yet paid to them.
 - Days slowest payment has been in queue for each currency.
 - Total USD, etc. owed to customers. (Total deposits)
 - Total USD, etc. in segregated customer cash account with bank.
nobody would send them more money.

They were sitting on a golden egg being the leading exchange on the most speculative market since Dutch Tulips.

I would imagine that they collected between 10 to 20 percent of all revenues generated in the financial i.e. speculative sector of the Bitcoin economy.

In the past they have been stumped by shear volume of interest, hackers, KYC/AML compliance demands, businesses partners demanding strict coherence to contracts.

We can all thank Mt.Gox for a lot and they have come trough before when everyone suspected we had  heard the last of them.

In the past they must have had several flashes of insights in the line of; "Damned, I guess we can no longer run a multinational financial business from my bedroom in our underwear". However they have also in the past been somewhat honest about their difficulties and presenting a strategy and a time line to solve things in their press statements.

I think that if their problems were balance sheet related, they would have shut down late July early August and been honest about it. I think their troubles are justice related and they are bending over flat to various investigators to supply costumer and transaction info, something they would not be able to disclose publicly. Other have suggested that too, and Gox might be in a situation similar to the e-Gold guy in the late 90'ies.

So yes, this is bad for Bitcoin and Gox and us the costumers with trading accounts. However Gox is not e-gold and in the case that Mark Kapels and the rest of the gang gets arrested and Gox shut down, our assets won't disappear, as was the case with e-gold as the exchange and the currency was one single entity, both found to be illegal.

We will have the same joint civil suit  rights as if we have dealt with any other private business. So if they are charged with not compliance to AML or other stuff, legit verified customers will have no trouble documenting their balances and claim compensation. This is very clear cut case compared to the Trendon Shavers mess. Gox also have some high profiled traders and investors that have money to burn on lawyers, another benefit for the small creditor if it ends like this.


 

Its only true if its up to €30k  in total. Anymore than that and you screw yourself worse.

Ya, time and time again I am blown away by Bitcoin businesses generally being so poor about communications.  It always seems like such a no-brainer to put oneself in the mind of a customer and ask oneself what kind of information and communications they may want, but they always seem to fall so short.  Dunno why.  It is probably easy for those of us on our side of the equation to underestimate the effort it might take to do various things, but I really cannot see how updating a blog could be so problematic. 

Another hypothesis is that somehow they are barred from discussing certain things, but that seems pretty weak in most cases.  I doubt that in instances such as Mt. Gox's issues (whatever they are) or Bitcoin-Central's Instawallet theft they are under some sort of gag order.  If they have lawyers that tell them not to talk then it should be easy and safe to just say so.

My strongest hypothesis is just that the kinds of people who get these businesses going (or buy them from someone who has...as is the case for both Mt. Gox and Instawallet come to think of it) are the types who would fall into a trap of believing themselves so elevated from the 'customer class' that we just don't warrant the time it takes to produce information.  Seems weird though.

I really wish they kept a blog or something. I don't understand why they are so secretive and opaque. Sometimes I feel like they are disgusted by their customers and want as little as possible to do with us. *sigh*

+1

All of the complaints have set my exceptions pretty low, and induced me to hedge my bets with other options before I even started trying to use them to trade out of BTC.  When I hit the 1 month for getting my wire (which is coming right up) I'll try to get some feedback from support and/or hook up to their IRC or whatever.  I accept that they may have more than their fair share of problems which are not their own fault, but it seems reasonable that Mt. Gox should proactively provide some general information, if not specific information, about how things are going.  I've not found it in the times I've logged on to try to check up on things.

I am waiting for a withdrawal form the 20th of august. St*pid Gox

Have you ever written a press release which got the press' attention?  This is not the kind of information you would put in a press release.  Press releases should be short and to the point, and leave out details. It would in fact be very unprofessional to put details like this in a press release.  The 20 days are a variable depending on the queue length, btw.  It is more like 10 now.

MtGox should however keep an updated information page about the status of withdrawals, queue disciplines and the length and trends of the various queues.  Much like the information I have collected from various sources.