Topic: THE TRUTH: Can someone withdraw fiat money from MTGOX? (Read 12464 times)

This is crazy....
Call the police maybe...

(Borrowed from the song "call me maybe"; it would be funny if it wasn't about serious money)

My next withdrawal just changed to pending today, so there were 3 days between withdrawals and 10 days between them being processed. So it's probably going to get worse before it gets better, if ever.

2013/05/14 confirmed
2013/05/10 confirmed
2013/05/08 confirmed
2013/05/07 confirmed
2013/05/06 pending
2013/05/03 processed

Great analogy!

HaHaHa!  MtGox is the new Hotel California. You can check out any time you like - but you can never leave

You would have loved Soviet Russia, where nobody was allowed to leave. For some strange reason their economy still sucked compared to the western countries, where anyone could leave any time they liked.

If people want to make their Bitcoins to dollars no one can stop this but maybe delay. Too many people simply want to get out. This is bad for the Bitcoin economy. Yes.

By this logic it's bad for the Bitcoin economy if MtGox fixes the problem of withdrawing fiat from the exchange. I hope you can see the flaw in that argument.

The amount of bitcoins being traded is a little bit abstract if they are traded against a strong decreasingly fiat volume.

There is never fiat "in the system". Either you use it to buy coins, in which case you no longer have the fiat, or you don't, in which case the fiat does not belong to the Bitcoin economy. It is also not possible to withdraw from the Bitcoin economy without anyone else entering it. This makes the amount of bitcoins being traded in a given time period (for fiat or goods) the only true measurement for how big the Bitcoin economy is.

MtGox still holds the vast majority of all fiat investments in bitcoin.

I do not see how Bitstamp and others take over. Only in the recent days half a million Dollar seems to have permanently disappeared from the MtGox orderbook. Where have they gone?

You define the market simply as the trading volume. But this is a misleading perspective. The trading volume is meaningless without capital.

On Bitstamp today I do not see more fiat money than half a year ago. They have a higher volume of trading because people use them for withdrawals. Or do People keep all the money on Bitstamp without ever place a bid? I don't think so. The people withdraw from Bitcoin. It was from the beginning just to make a fast buck. Now the party is over.

I hope that I am wrong. But as long as fiat money just disappears out of the system I will not deceive myself​​. The trading volume is not very interesting by now. Bitstamp can also have the highest trading when we go back to single digits.

If we would have the same volume of trade as in March and Bitstamp would take a higher market share that would be very interesting. But this is not the case. Not Bitstamp grows, Gox shrinks. And so the whole market melts away. That is the situation. I hope I'm wrong, but that's what I think.

I agree with you overall that MtGox is not dead.
All I am saying is that their market share has been plummeting and is likely to continue to fall until they provide more reassurance and better transparency.
In the meanwhile, other exchanges will continue to grow. As they grow, they will also have more profits to reinvest into better trading engines etc which again fuel their growth

https://www.facebook.com/MtGox?filter=2

This could easily happen if people would stop drinking Coca Cola or searching the internet.  
The trading volume has returned to the level of January. What are we talking about?  

At this moment Gox has $ 13 million in the order book. On the ask side are 115T BTC. This gives a ratio of $ 113 per coin.
Remember that almost all of the dollars will stay on Gox until Gox has solved the withdrawal problem.

At the moment we see on Bitstamp about half a million dollars and a few thousand Coins. What would happend if tens of thousands of coins would be transferred from Gox to Bitstamp? Even if only half of the coins, which are now on Gox would be sold on Bitstamp, we would go back to single digits. But that will not happen in my opinion. Bitstamp has simply taken the role of Dwolla, Liberty Reserve and OKPay for Gox traders. No more and no less. The arbitrage is nothing more than the fee that previously was paid to Dwolla, LR or OKPay. The market has already adjusted to the new conditions.

How should we transfer $ 13 million and more to Bitstamp and why? With all of what is in the accounts there are maybe at least 20 million on Gox. My programs are written for the Gox API. I have no desire to start from scratch on a half done platform like Bitstamp. This is somehow depressing.

I'll take Bitstamp gradually and in addition. It's also interesting because of ripple. But we can not just write-off Gox and all the money. This would be plain crazy and would lead to a massive price drop from which bitcoin probably never will recover. Nobody want that. If Gox goes really broke it will be bought by someone. I'm 100% sure. Bitstamp is only the new Dwolla, Liberty Reserve and OKPay for Gox traders.  

It is quite normal the the MtGox market share does not go to 0 in one go.
But losing market share from 80% about 6-9 months ago down to about 40% is massive.
Think about if Coke or google lost half of its market share...

I have stopped using MtGox, too.

Stopgoxxed :-)
Goxstopped :-)

The explanation is of the short term behavior during the early stages of a bitcoin exchange crisis.  Nobody's saying this is a permanent condition.



Well, technically if they're not allowing fiat withdrawals there's no reason why the "balances" should ever be exhausted… or even be related to deposits!  But that's a whole other level of scamminess that I don't think we've reached (yet?).

The discrepancy in bitcoin price between mtGox and other exchanges is directly resultant from the inability to make fiat withdrawals from Gox. If this problem didn't exist, it would create an arbitrage opportunity and the free market would quickly bring prices between exchanges to an equilibrium.

The reason there is still so much activity on Gox is because people still use it to convert fiat to btc. Gox has no problem receiving wire transfers, they just seem to have a problem sending them out.

Also, Gox has a more advanced trading platform than the other exchanges. So, a large portion of the activity on Gox is just people trading on the fluctuations in btc with no interest in actually withdrawing their fiat balances. i.e. Today you could have sold 100 btc @ 97 USD and had a fiat balance of $9700 and later today you could have bought 105.4 btc @92 USD. The fact is nearly all of the activity on Gox is just trading like this with no actual withdrawal to USD.

What is unusual is that people are still loyal to gox and using it for this type of trading. Most likely because it still has higher volume and better tools for trading have been developed, so people continue to favor it.

The TRUE price of bitcoin is what you can immediately buy and sell for. What really doesn't make sense is why Gox is still the go to reference for bitcoin price and not bitstamp.

Reread my post. This situation isn't normal.

That explanation doesn't hold water. Sure, in the short term prices on the fiat non-paying exchange will go up, but that only lasts until the fiat balances are exhausted. If people lack confidence in the exchange they wont be sending fiat there, so the process has an end point where there is no fiat on the exchange, volume drops to zero and price is undefined. The MtGox situation has been going on for months. Wouldn't all pre-crisis fiat balances have been exhausted by now?

No, it's exactly what you'd expect in a situation like this.