MtGox Sets Up Call Center For Worried Bitcoiners 240
An anonymous reader writes "Did you lose bitcoins in the MtGox debacle and are worried that you'll never get them back? Fear not, a call center has been set up in Japan to help allay your fears. From the article: 'Bitcoin investors left hanging by the sudden shuttering of the MtGox electronic market will soon have a way to learn more about the fate of their cryptocurrency holdings—a Japanese phone hotline. In an announcement on the company's website, MtGox said that a call center had been set up to handle inquiries about the company. The call center will go live on the morning of March 3, Japan time.'"
Moshi moshi (Score:5, Interesting)
Losing taught humility
Gained me Perspective
I'm a better person now
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I already posted so I can't mod, but I just have to say that's a wonderful quote.
A call to the call center (Score:5, Funny)
Here's how I see it going:
"Are all my bitcoins gone?"
-"Yes."
-"Oh..."
-"Have a good day"
*click*
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Mt Gox call-center
Are all my bit-coins gone sir?
That is a bingo.
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Regulation of currency (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Regulation of currency (Score:5, Interesting)
On the whole BitCoin fans don't think that. Maybe some naive kids who got a lot of coins by being in the right place at the right time think that. If they do it will cost them dearly. There are perfectly rational people in the BitCoin scene, people who do research and don't throw money at companies that look shady as hell like MtGox did before it blew.
It's been said many times and it deserves to be said many more - MtGox had only been paying out cash with months of delays for about a year before they went insolvent. Their death was widely predicted about a year before it happened. MtGox also has a history of very serious security issues like the time they leaked their entire user database. Hashed passwords, Usernames, Email addresses, the lot.
Re:Regulation of currency (Score:4, Insightful)
The cost of doing business with BTC is unacceptably high when every person needs to do their own research.
That is another failure with under-regulated markets. In those markets, people's time is expected to be worthless. Every person is expected to spend lots of time reading up on all sorts of stuff that is irrelevant in a well-regulated market.
The bitcoin people are probably reading all ToS on all websites they visit as well, right? RIGHT?
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Bitcoin is still young. This is a time or risk and opportunity. Besides, if you really think anyone should invest money, for example in the stock market, without spending lots of time reading up on all sorts of stuff, I have a bridge to sell you.
Re:Regulation of currency (Score:5, Insightful)
Bitcoin is still young. This is a time or risk and opportunity. Besides, if you really think anyone should invest money, for example in the stock market, without spending lots of time reading up on all sorts of stuff, I have a bridge to sell you.
Monkeys do better than people in the stock market [gizmodo.com.au] - I'm sure they did lots of market research beforehand though.
Re:Regulation of currency (Score:5, Insightful)
Monkeys do better than people in the stock market [gizmodo.com.au] - I'm sure they did lots of market research beforehand though.
But you really want a rate of return better than a monkey, otherwise you might as well invest in index funds, how boring is that?
So the trick is to identify when people, in general, are being less-smart than monkeys and then run in the opposite direction.
It's not an easy business, outsmarting the monkeys - that's why it's better to be lucky than smart.
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But you really want a rate of return better than a monkey, otherwise you might as well invest in index funds, how boring is that?
If you want to gamble with money in an exciting way; I suggest going to Vegas.
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7 out! Line away!
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If you want to gamble with money in an exciting way; I suggest going to Vegas.
The folks in Vegas don't take it well when you try to use your intellect to improve your odds. The market, however, permits it. That is a pretty-big difference. Frankly, I do not find games that come with restrictions about how I can use my brain and electronic extensions to be nearly as exciting.
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If you think investing in the stock market has anything to do with research and nothing with inside trading and a lot of crystal ball consultation, I'd rather not sell that bridge. You might get cheated in the deal.
Re:Regulation of currency (Score:4, Informative)
The kind of reading which should be mandatory before investing in the stock market is about risk management, not about how to find the company that will make you rich. Knowing how much to invest, how to diversify and how to avoid rookie mistakes will help with not losing your life's savings, whether you're investing in the stock market or Bitcoins.
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Bitcoin is still young. This is a time or risk and opportunity. Besides, if you really think anyone should invest money...
Bitcoin first has to prove itself as a currency.
Promoting Bitcoin as a money-maker --- an investment opportunity like tulip futures --- will destroy it.
Re:Regulation of currency (Score:5, Insightful)
Once you count the dreadful freakshows grafted onto real currencies, BTC actually scores relatively low on complexity, on average; but the trouble is that there isn't really a 'safe for noobs' option.
With USD and friends, you should Stay Out Of The Deep End, because that's where the sharks live; but (in no small part because regulators stepped in to make it so) just getting a smallish bank account isn't a harrowing experience.
Re:Regulation of currency (Score:5, Insightful)
In those markets, people's time is expected to be worthless. Every person is expected to spend lots of time reading up on all sorts of stuff that is irrelevant in a well-regulated market.
No its not worthless its an investment in risk management. Your alternative is they invest tax dollars in paying a small army of regulators and politicians to in theory look out for their interests instead. Look how well the events of 2008-2013 show that works.
And don't try say it was because of "deregulation" it was because of changed and stupid regulations not deregulation which has essentially never happened in finance. Real deregulation would mean repealing laws without replacements. When most of our politicians say "deregulation" what they really mean is we are giving a select group of already successful incumbent operators a license to steal.
Re:Regulation of currency (Score:5, Interesting)
Real deregulation would mean repealing laws without replacements.
Just out of curiosity, what "replacement" was enacted after the repeal of Glass-Steagal?
Re:Regulation of currency (Score:5, Insightful)
unacceptably high for whom?
There are plenty of cases where the cost/risk might be acceptable.
If I want to buy something for $100 and anonymity is important, then I may well be happy to risk losing my $100.
Similarly if I have a bunch of illicit cash and I can convert it into bitcoin - I might be willing to risk losing it rather than risk it coming to the attention of the authorities.
Is bitcoin suitable for your average person to store their pension savings? Almost certainly not. That doesn't mean the cost (risk) is unacceptably high for everyone though.
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Great! Then those people who just stole $400+ million by siphoning BTC from Mt. Gox wallets will be caught! Nothing to worry about at all!
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The cost of doing business with BTC is unacceptably high when every person needs to do their own research.
You certainly have to be more careful, but on the other hand the average tax payer won't have to pay for the MtGox collapse like they did for the banking crisis.
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The cost of doing business with BTC is unacceptably high when every person needs to do their own research
Indeed, but doing it that way isn't a requirement for Bitcoin.
There is already at least one service [bitpay.com] that takes all of the research out of it from the seller's perspective. Customers pay into a Bitcoin address; all the seller needs to do does is sign up, integrate it into their checkout system and they get money in their bank account at the end of every day.
All we need now is a similar service for the customer end. The obvious way to do it would be a service that takes a credit card payment and turns it into
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But that is how markets improve. Someone reading up on all that stuff finds something everyone else thought was irrelevant but turns out to make a difference, regardless of whether the market is well-regulated or unregulated. Just because you want to be lazy and have
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You make it sound as if regulation was something completely exotic. Regulation actually exists, and there is plenty of it. To answer you question: If regulators make mistakes, they are eventually corrected. Happens all the time.
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And what happens if FDIC goes bust too?
One of two things: Congress bows to public pressure and raises taxes to fill FDIC's coffers, or the Fed bows to public pressure and prints money and gives it to the FDIC.
Surely there are winners and losers in that kind of situation, but in general, the "regular folk" who have less than $250K in the bank will be made whole, and the burden will fall on whoever has insufficient political power. But in my mind it is a much better social result than taxation based on one's inability to select a good business
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It depends on the definition of "you." In the second person plural sense, where "you" includes every taxpayer (in scenario 1) or includes every user of the currency (in scenario 2), then yes, "you" are just made whole with "your" own money. But in almost any normal usage of "you," there are certainly different winners and losers, depending on who had money in the failed institution and depends on receiving money for goods and services from those people (the winners) or who gets hit by the increased taxes, o
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Re:Regulation of currency (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds like you don't want regulation of Bitcoin per se, but instead regulation of exchanges. Or, more generally, you want regulation of anybody to which you give money with the expectation of getting it back. I'd expect that legislation to exist already, because the concept of "a company which holds on to your money for a bit" is one that's existed for a long time before Bitcoin.
As an aside: as far as I'm aware, Paypal does not come with this protection in the US. They can take your money, and there's sod all you can do about it. In Europe, Paypal is a bank... but actually, according to their website, don't qualify for deposit protection [paypal.com] anyway, so they can happily go bust and your deposits won't be covered.
It's notable that people still use Paypal.
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Sure would be nice if we had a system where sellers could switch their provider while still selling to the same buyers, and where buyers could switch their provider while still buying from the same sellers.
Oh wait.
(I made this post [slashdot.org] further up in the thread describing this, so I'll just link to it rather than repeat myself.)
Re:Regulation of currency (Score:5, Interesting)
On the whole BitCoin fans don't think that.
While there are some quite clued up people in bitcoin (ie the bitcoin FAQ on the official page), there are a lot of anti government people who really don't understand our current banking systems at all. Then of course there are lot of speculators. It could be argued they don't really care as long as they can predict.
Personally some form of ecoin appeals to me and the bitcoin system is well thought out. Its has some flaws like scalability etc and too long to confirm transactions that all could be remedied with a different set of implementation details. Perhaps what i like the best is that block chains could be used to prove the existence of something at a time in a fairly secure manner. ie hash of security camera footage, ideas book, patent applications etc.
But it has failed as a currency to date. At best is a speculative thing. And i remain unconvinced that a proof of work is a good idea. Utility of those resources is wasted and would be better spent elsewhere.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Regulation of currency (Score:4, Funny)
I mostly agree with you, bitcoin fans are living in denial.
However, a "safe" way to manage your bitcoins is to keep them in multiple distributed wallets that you control.
And the idea IS that the invisible hand will eventually prevent these collapses. In the meantime, there will be more of them. That can only happen if the invisible hand stops fucking you, also. Otherwise it's too busy.
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In a free market, there would be far more exchanges to choose from, and so it would have been much harder for a poorly-managed exchange like Mt. Gox to rise to the top. The reason that there is a scarcity of bitcoin exchanges to choose from is not due to too little regulation; it is due to too much. The anti-money laundering laws in the U.S., for example, scare most banks away from anything that is related to bitcoin, and that makes it very hard for law abiding citizens to start an exchange in the U.S. Why
Re:Regulation of currency - 2 issues (Score:5, Insightful)
1) bitcoin value goes up and down, so does everything else. Live with it or dont use it.
2) Storing your bitcoins on a server owned by someone else is like giving your cash to someone you dont know. Maybe it will still be there, maybe it wont. If you are on Linux, or Windows or OSX, use a client like electrum (electrum.org). You can store the bitcoin wallet on your own computer, without relying on some not so trusted intermediary. You do do backups dont you?
Yesterday I transferred most of my bitcoin stash (~$500 Aussie) into my own wallet on my own computer, and backed it up elsewhere.
The bitcoin is now safe, the value of it may change up and down. Bit like owning shares, isn't it?
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"Maybe some naive kids who got a lot of coins by being in the right place at the right time think that. If they do it will cost them dearly. "
i don't really think any "kids" who mined bitcoin early on enough to really hit a lick would be dumb enough to store them at mt. gox...so its not like they lost anything.
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I'm still waiting for cash withdrawals since July, the writing was on the wall back then. In fact I was in the process of bailing out of Mt Gox when my last few transactions got stuck.
Re:Regulation of currency (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Regulation of currency (Score:4, Insightful)
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database management from an online bookstore
The high volume retailer is the right place to go if you are studying the successes and failures of database management.
Rational (Score:3)
they wouldnt be touching Bitcoins.
or at least, they won't be risking more money than they can afford to lose.
I mean bitcoin is a fun new technology to start experimenting with. And so it might be interesting for some to risk a bit in order to play with it.
But just don't act like those idiots ready to throw tons of money everywhere just on the vague promise that this one scam could help them make bazillions-USD-worth of BTCs.
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Banks are regulated?
Fuck, I don't even want to ponder what our economy would look like without if THAT is what it looks like WITH regulated banks!
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Bit coin is stupid because it can't expand and shrink to fit economic use.
Money is convenient form barter and needs to represent the productive capital of its users and to remain stable for a given capital. (Eg an apple is worth 1dollar from year to year, 1 dollar today, then 10 dollars next week)
As more people use it, scarcity increases its value, making early adopters insanely rich. See the con.
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Bitcoin isn't though in the sense that this money was actually STOLEN.
With fractional reserve banking you can rob a country of trillions and it isn't technically stealing. These bitcoins were STOLEN.
Like and old school bankrobbery where some guy breaks into the bank and walks off with boxes of gold coins. Stolen.
And the issue with these bitcoin exchanges is that they were not handling transactions securely. Bitcoin itself is secure. But they made compromises when they set the exchanges up and guess what...
Re:Regulation of currency (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed, MtGox managed to devalue everyone's assets by half without creating any inflation whatsoever. What an amazing innovation.
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Yes, it is a problem when three months of growth in an investment is wiped out overnight, especially if you bought in during that period. It's even worse news for anyone who wasn't investing and was trying to use Bitcoin to actually buy things.
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Hypothetically, you might be able to prevent most leverage-providing instruments if all depositors deposited a specific bitcoin, with the right to demand that specific one back (though, since that would effectively prevent most uses to which deposits are put, any institution of
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Hypothetically, you might be able to prevent most leverage-providing instruments if all depositors deposited a specific bitcoin, with the right to demand that specific one back...
There is no such thing as a specific bitcoin; it's an abstract unit. If you simply want to store your bitcoins securely, at practically zero cost, there are numerous "paper wallet" systems available, as well as multi-key wallets at various points on the convenience/paranoia continuum.
If you want to receive interest, however, then you have to recognize that you are making a loan—which implies the possibility of default. Interest-bearing accounts are investments, and you should not expect to be insured
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The General consensus is that it was pure fraud. (Score:5, Informative)
http://hackingdistributed.com/... [hackingdistributed.com]
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And the difference to the stock market would be...?
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Both are markets where buying and selling, and the price at which it happens, is dictated by the hopes, dreams and expectations of the participants rather than business facts.
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s/reasonable/unreasonable
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In what way isn't the hypothesis our government or at least certain parts of it actively sought to destroy Bitcoin reasonable?
How about a complete lack of evidence?
But I'm sure that's going to be as successful an argument with the Bitards as it is with anyone who believes in things without evidence.
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The Conversation (Score:2)
If only... (Score:3)
If only there was a more efficient way to publish information and make it available to a large group of people.
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The K government is already planning to help (Score:2)
From the BBC:
"HMP Grampian will also have a dedicated unit for training prisoners for a return to work when they are released. The unit will include a telephone marketing centre." [bbc.co.uk]
The only problem I see that being in prison already makes trying to sign you up for a scam less of a risk for the operator, but I digress :)
Reality Intrudes (Score:4, Interesting)
There are a lot of people these days, many of them readers of Slashdot, who espouse a belief system with a lot of delusional features: Libertarianism. This position, along with the similar political belief of the U.S. Republican Party, the British Torries and Canadian Conservatives share common beliefs. One prominent belief is that all government regulation of business is always evil. They are particularly adamant that financial regulation is always destructive.
An epic recent example is the admission by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan [wikipedia.org], who is self described as "lifelong libertarian Republican".
The failure of Mt. Gox is a inevitable consequence of an unregulated financial market. Bank failures were common in the U.S. from it's founding until modern baking regulation started after the Great Depression, when they became uncommon. This situation was stable until the Reagan Revolution, and steady removal of the previously working regulatory regime.
Greenspan is the poster child for the catastrophic effects of delusional right wing economic thinking, and the 2008 crash along with the current debt of the U.S. are the legacy. The world economy is still recovering from that disaster, and no one can say how long it will take for a full recovery. Note that the so called recovery of the financial markets is simply an extension of the policies that lead to the crash in the first place. What Matt Taibbi described is still happening: "they could go back to the Fed and borrow money at zero or one or two percent".
Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies are the high tech realization of delusional right wing economic thinking. They are ideologically founded on the idea of avoiding government economic oversight. Lack of regulation inevitably leads to a boom/bust cycle and poisons economic growth
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Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies are the high tech realization of delusional right wing economic thinking. They are ideologically founded on the idea of avoiding government economic oversight. Lack of regulation inevitably leads to a boom/bust cycle and poisons economic growth.
Bitcoin is only intended to solve the problem of money production and changing hands. It does not in any way address banking. It is a currency, not an economic system.
It basically solves the same problems as trading in gold solves - there is no inflation because the rate of production is well-understood. I can still rob you and steal your gold, and a bank you give gold to can still steal your money or lose it in a failure.
MtGox certainly illustrates the perils of giving your money to an unregulated bank.
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A lot easier to rob too, just grab the one server with the bit coin data on it and walk out the door, far easier than hanging out and breaking into a big heavy safe.
Except, of course, that any institution with any brains would have multiple copies of that data and it would be encrypted. So stealing it would do no good for the thief as they can't use it, and stealing it would do no harm to the company because they have another copy.
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Though I largely agree, I think you're over simplifying the story a bit. For example:
Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies are the high tech realization of delusional right wing economic thinking. They are ideologically founded on the idea of avoiding government economic oversight.
Are you sure about this? Certainly there are a lot of Libertarian "types" among the BitCoin fans, but was this the sole (or even primary) motivation for the inventors?
They have shown no ability to learn from the past.
While this is certainly true of many on the right (and the left, for that matter), there are also quite a few who either learned something or never believed the ideology in the first place. Most of these continue pushing the old line simply because it's their
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(Note: one of the differences between the scientific method and other belief systems is that new results are often are used as evidence to alter the belief, i.e. hypothesis, so the belief system expands.)
As far as I have seen, both the scientific method and other belief systems both do that, although most religions are much more slow to accept change than science. But science is getting more and more set in its ways as well, these days.
Re:Reality Intrudes (Score:5, Insightful)
Not quite true: self-organising systems can regulate themselves into surprisingly resilient equilibria. This is why the economy doesn't need constant micro-management; feedback loops like supply and demand tend to damp out perturbations. However there's no reason to suppose that any given equilibrium arising from any given set of constraints and feedbacks will be optimal for whatever outcome you're looking for, be it quality of life, GDP per capita, or whatever. The "laissez faire capitalism is implied by self-organisation" argument tends to assume without evidence that the best equilibrium is the one you fall into with the set of feedbacks and constraints that the proponent's flavour of laissez faire capitalism favours. However it's important to remember that there's no reason to assume that the equilibrium produced by the current set of rules is optimal, either.
It's also important to remember that if your system naturally falls out of its current equilibrium (which is a thing self-organising systems can do) you will need to change the feedbacks and constraints or apply an external force to get it back to where it was. Basically, you can't walk away and say "this system is inherently able to look after us, if we leave it alone", just on the basis of its being a self-organising system.
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Republicans are not running the show.
Hardly matters. Both parties are more-or-less "owned" by the corporate oligarchy, the Democrats are just a bit less brazen about it. (I'm too lazy to look up the numbers right now, but I'm sure you know Obama got a LOT of help from Wall Street to get elected.)
saying that the financial sector has been de-regulated. This is absurd
The repeal of Glass-Steagal was a pretty huge step in that direction. (And it was signed into law by Clinton, another "friend" of Wall Street.)
The only hope I see of changing things is a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and get some
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We are fucked, that's all there is to it.
LOL, cynical much? ;-)
First, if not an amendment, what would you suggest as a solution?
You think any petty rules and pieces of paper is going to change the system when we had a whole Constitution to back us for so long and look what happened
We do still have a "civil society" governed by laws, though how long that will last is anybody's guess. Such things matter. I never said that the amendment was sufficient to fix the problem, just that it's the only hope we have of restoring some semblance of democracy. And this is true. As long as corporations have the same rights as people, the people are screwed. Therefore such an amendment is a necessary step on the pa
Call center script... (Score:2)
Hire refugees from AT&T (Score:2)
They've already got the script:
"First, let me say that I'm sorry that you're having a problem with your Bitcoin service today..."
Pay-number (Score:2)
I do wonder what they charge per minute .. might a a lucrative way to squeeze even more money out of their 'clients' =)
Stupid question (Score:2)
I don't know much about Bitcoin, and it's probably a stupid question, but where did the BTCs go?
Isn't it possible to trace it, and prove that you owned them?
This is the second, not first MtGox incident (Score:3)
I had.. a few Bitcoins a very long time ago.
I stopped being interested the first time the exchange went screwy and f--ked over people. I think it was a database hack of some type or DDOS.
It's unregulated, and the problem is you need a exchange to turn Bitcoins into Cash, and Cash into Bitcoins. That means somewhere you have to trust someone.
Call me when a nation state is backing a cryptocurrency. That will change everything. Until then it is a crap shoot.
Me Japanese, Me Make Joke (Score:2)
And here's the call centre script (Score:5, Funny)
Holly: They're gone Dave.
Lister: Whose are?
Holly: Everybody's Dave.
Lister: What Captain Holister's?
Holly: Everybody's Bitcoins are gone Dave.
Lister: What Todd Hunter's?
Holly: Everybody's Bitcoins are gone Dave.
Lister: What Selby's?
Holly: They're all gone, everybody's Bitcoins are gone Dave.
Lister: Peterson's aren't, are they?
Holly: Everybody's Bitcoins are gone Dave.
Lister: Not Chen's?
Holly: Gorden Bennet, yes Chen's, everybody's. Everybody's Bitcoins are gone Dave.
Lister: Rimmer's?
Holly: They're gone Dave, everybody's Bitcoins are gone, everybody's Bitcoins are gone Dave.
Lister: Wait, are you trying to tell me everybody's Bitcoins are gone?
Let me guess (Score:2)
Press 1 for Japanese
Press 2 for Spanish
Press 3 for English
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Another possible ending to that call (Score:5, Funny)
Caller: What?!?!? I had 100 BitCoins with you!!!! I am going to sue you!
Handler:: You just had some bytes with us, sir. Do you remember when you posted that copying music against copyright shouldn't be a crime because it was just bytes and nothing tangible and had little, if any, value? We will gladly compensate you for the value of the bytes you lost, the bytes that you have publicly stated have little if any value. See you in court
Caller:Gahhhhhhhh!!!!!!
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And now you know why the banks didn't install something like that when our money went poof.
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If they do it right, they can even make a profit on the call centre and pay down some of their dollar/yen liabilities.
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Sumimasen! O-kyaku-sama no bitokoinu-wa kietta arimasu! Moushiwake arimasen!
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Why did people lose their bitcoins? Surely any sensible person would keep their coins in their own wallet.
I can think of a couple of reasons why people would keep their bitcoins in the exchange.
1: they were lazy/ignorant of the risks of storing money (whether bitcoins or dollars) in such organisations.
2: they wanted to be able to execute trades quickly, moving bitcoins into the exchange takes time which may mean that by the time you get them into the exchange the opportunity they were trying to trade on is no longer there.
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Why did people lose their bitcoins? Surely any sensible person would keep their coins in their own wallet. The nature of bitcoins is that it is a distributed currency, so the only reason for bitcoins to leave your wallet is when you are making a payment. So the only potential for loss when an exchange stops trading should be those who have initiated the transaction to convert bitcoins into fiat currency but have not received it.
People had bitcoins on MTGox because they were buying and selling them in an attempt to outguess the market. Once upon a time, people had their bitcoins on MTGox only for a short time in order to convert them to a currency and withdraw or to put currency in and exchange it to bitcoin, but at some point, MTGox started to suck at being able to distribute out currencies, so there was no point for the site at all other than speculation.
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sure, it comes with a supply of xanax to deal with angry people all day