Bitcoin BoardWhat was once the worlds biggest Bitcoin Exchange, Mt.Gox, has now become a company victim to its own success. Their outdated homepage still states that they are “the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange”, but most of the people already realize they are only processing a small percentage of daily Bitcoin trades.
The Downfall of Mt.Gox, as some like to call it, started around june 2013 when they stopped processing USD Wire Transfers to all american bank accounts due to “Regulation Problems”. Other major exchanges like Bitstamp or BTC-e, have not yet had these problems, however they did sharpen their required documents for bank transfers. We were told by Mt.Gox back then in 2013 that the issue would be resolved in a matter of a few weeks. Till today, they are still not processing Bank Withdrawals to users from all over the world. Some say that they do not have enough Fiat in their banks to buy the coins people want to sell, others say that they just had some problems, which would be fixed soon.
Last friday, Mt.Gox made an announcement that they had stopped all Bitcoin withdrawals due to upgrades they would perform over the weekend. We have since then adviced anybody to stop using Mt.Gox since this action seemed incredibly suspicious to us.
As of today, Mt.Gox has released an official press release stating that they can not activate Bitcoin withdrawals because of a “bug” in the Bitcoin source code. The supposed bug makes it possible for someone to use the Bitcoin network to alter transaction details to make it seem like a sending of bitcoins to a bitcoin wallet did not occur when in fact it did occur. The lead developers of the Bitcoin Project have denied the existence of this bug.
Mt.Gox has also made claims that they were “working with the Bitcoin core development team and others to mitigate this issue”, when in fact they did not have contact with the core developers at all. A statement from Bitcoin core developer Jeff Garzik:
The #bitcoin protocol and network are just fine today. Let's not over-react about a technical issue in one custom implementation.
— Jeff Garzik (@jgarzik) February 10, 2014
All these suspicious actions have lead us to believe that Mt.Gox is purposely trying to bring down the Bitcoin price by releasing false statements, and causing panic amongst many users. They may have sold a lot of Bitcoins in the past few weeks, to stack up cash & make huge profits after the price dip that followed this false statement. They have been irrelevant as a Bitcoin exchange these past few months, and thousands of people are closing their accounts for good. After today, a massive amount of people on /r/Bitcoin are urging users to close their accounts on this shady exchange.
You can think whatever you want about Mt.Gox, but no one can deny that this is all very suspicious. We say it again: We advice you to step away from this exchange and go elsewhere, because it looks like they are definitely out of the game right now.
