First, as to bias : back in 2011, when I was new and actually could have used support, I asked Karpeles to link MPOE from MtGox' webpage. He wouldn't and we've never been friends since, which is pregnant of the following moral : when you say no to people you don't know, you don't know who you're saying no to.

MtGox had been self-trading since day one, which is understandable seeing how that's how and why it was even made : the owner wanted a place to trade his Bitcoin. That owner incidentally is in no way related to Karpeles - MtGox was transferred by a US citizen to pretty much anyone who'd take it, out of legal concerns. So it ended up with Karpeles and the current gang.

As a result MtGox was poorly run by incompetent, dishonest schmucks with delusions of self importance from day one. Let's go into details :

As to incompetence :

MtGox was using for self-trades an unlimited special account. Because why not, right ?

When a disagreement broke out with the old owner (over Karpeles refusing to pay up the modest sums he owed as per their agreement) it turned out that old owner still had working passwords - half a year after the transfer was completed! So he proceeded to log into the unlimited selftrading account and pushed MtGox Bitcoin price to 0.01, the lowest it'd go .

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Need I mention lag ? Or appallingly poor PR ?

Need I mention lag ? Or appallingly poor PR ? In spite of trading with infinite funds on their own play-pretend exchange, MtGox never managed to turn a profit from it. Let that sink in for a minute, will you.

As to dishonesty :

Pretty much everything MtGox ever said publicly was a lie. Everything. Each and every one thing. They lied about the nature of the original "hack", they lied about their financial situation, they lied about the causes of the lag, everything.

Pretty much everything MtGox ever said privately was also a lie, and this includes signed paperwork delivered to various authorities. Such as : they announced they're complying with US regulations June 2013, they had their accounts blocked by August 2013. Turns out the various signed affidavits and whatnot weren't actually accurate.

They are lying even today, in the 13th hour :

Our initial investigations indicate that a vendor exploited a recently discovered vulnerability in the Bitcoin protocol known as “transaction malleability” to repeatedly withdraw coins from our system until it was completely empty. It is false that this is either recent, discovered or a vulnerability. The fact that transactions can be altered without the signature of the originator so that they have the same effect but under some examinations appear different has been amply documented since at the latest 2011. Everyone knew this, most people took care of it. Some (incompetent) people didn't. It's in no sense a "vulnerability" of anything but of the application which relies on unstandard, undocumented presumptions. It is further false that this was "exploited" by a third party. This is merely the expedient if quite transparent manner in which MtGox justifies to the clueless general public its emptying of its own wallets, for the benefit of those select investors who have Karpeles' balls in a vice, and to the detriment of other creditors - such as for instance the unfortunate schmucks who had their resources stolen by Amir Taaki, Patrick Strateman and James McCarthy, assembled together as "Bitcoin Consultancy", a group of fantasy-experts in fantasy-topics that were brought in to sink Bitcoinica.

As to delusions of self-importance :

MtGox' first move after receiving some investment was to acquire a defunct Polish exchange , in an attempt to pretend like they're a sort of MP of Bitcoin finance, the backstoppers of everything. It cost a lot of money, it failed to deliver the intended result. Might have something to do with the competence required to actually be MP, or who knows, maybe it's just bad luck.

, in an attempt to pretend like they're a sort of MP of Bitcoin finance, the backstoppers of everything. It cost a lot of money, it failed to deliver the intended result. Might have something to do with the competence required to actually be MP, or who knows, maybe it's just bad luck. The so-called Bitcoin Foundation doohickey was an unholy alliance of scams : MtGox, BFL, Coinlab/base/desk etc, all under the attentive care of one Peter Vessenes, who just so happens to be both the executive and the treasurer of the thing, and who has been soliciting donations (much in the manner the bitcoin forum has been - which is to say in exchange for "titles") without having released any sort of financial report in the past couple of years. And again much like the forum, all it's ever done was to vouch for scams and ruin reputations.

To sum it all up : You're not watching anything interesting, new or surprising. The demise of MtGox was privately announced at my secret conference early April 2013, and then publicly a week or so later. The only novel thing in this world is the history you didn't know.

This particular troop of scammers is going to continue doing the same thing again and again and again. You are either going to continue to fall for it or learn not to fall for it. All the other groups of scammers are also going to continue doing the same things they do, again and again and again. The names may change, the color scheme may change. The thing won't change, because if they had the brains to change and make sense and follow reality and deliver value they wouldn't be scammers, they'd be in business. They'd be listed on MPEx even.

This is pretty much the whole story.

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