The community that for months has been preaching the virtues of the currency nobody can control is suddenly arguing that a middleman should roll back a bunch of free-market transactions.
I decided a while ago that arguing against the "bitcoin has no problems" crowd was futile: people are too enamored with the idea to see problems like this until they happen.
This would make no sense if you supported a decentralized cryptocurrency, but would make perfect sense if you were worried about losing the ability to cash out of your penny stock of choice when, due to freak coincidence, a separate scam targeting the same stock imploded prior to you being able to unload the shares you had acquired for fractions of a cent at $17+ each.
The Bitcoin "community" is an emergent, distributed boiler room. They could just as easily be selling pink clam shells, tulips, or shares in an insolvent company that had a business plan to make pool cleaning agents. The underlying commodity doesn't matter. What does matter is that the widely disbursing the underlying commodity early gave them enough of a following, including folks who are savvy enough to think that they are the ones getting rich off the marks (a classic element of fraud), to attempt to convince other people that there is actually intrinsic value in what they are selling.
Every article about Bitcoin which makes it to HN -- yes, including ones in mainstream publications -- is in effect a PR hit planted by a new breed of the old boiler room scam.
BTC is neither generally accepted nor does it have the STABLE VALUE needed to become more accepted as a medium of exchange. And last element is something the Bitcommunists just utterly miss. Because a currency is medium, just a means, it will not function unless its value is stable. Not decreasing OR increasing.
Whenever the BTC shills tout the increasing value, they've accomplished the old "switch-a-roo" from currency to speculative commodity.
"Folks, in the grown-up world, trades are unwound when the market malfunctions. --Jeff Garzik, bitcoin core dev team"
In the grown-up world, currency is controlled by governments, the financial industry is regulated, and money cannot be transferred large distances anonymously. The whole sales pitch of BitCoin is that it is free of all this control. Invoking "the grown-up world" to describe BitCoin is absurd.
Where exactly do you live? Many offshore banks offer privacy even against police authorities, and tax evasion reaches billions per year. The crackdown on that is fairly recent (5-10 years) and still very ineffective.
The main reason why Bitcoin can't be considered grown-up is because there aren't guys like Soisson showing up dead.
This is an exchange issue, not a BitCoin issue. The exchange is entitled to behave however it wants. In fact, if it wants to remain profitable it should behave in a responsible, reliable way. In this case it means appeasing the majority of its users.
The market intervention that people are demanding is only possible because Mt Gox is a centralized exchange. Had this been a hack of a pure BitCoin client, it would have been even worse, because the theft would have been irreversible.
If the community wants rollbacks when transactions aren't "fair," what's the point of BitCoin again?
Right. It's clear that this is not a problem with Bitcoin itself, but a problem with an institution built on top of it. If Mt Gox fails, other trading platforms could emerge to take its place.
Likewise the freedom from government intervention that is the point of Bitcoin does not ensure freedom from government intervention in trading platforms built upon it.
Not that I don't expect problems to emerge with Bitcoin itself...
http://www.bitcoincharts.com lists the daily trading volume of various exchanges. I think the numbers for Mt. Gox represent the volume before things went sour, so based on that, Mt. Gox sees almost 30 times the volume of the next largest exchange.
I'm probably thinking of something different - but wasn't it clear in the bitcoin protocol itself that if a single actor controlled a majority percentage of the bitcoins out there, the model falls apart and is at risk?
Sorry, we have our wires crossed. You can still transfer bitcoins from one person to the other. An exchange is a website that allows you convert bitcoins in USD. MtGox controlled about 90% of the BTC↔USD conversions.
I think the problem here is the existence of Mt Gox itself. It seems like creating a centralized exchange for a currency that does not yet have a real economy associated with it - and which has been hyped by the internet meme machine - is just asking for the currency to become the victim of wild speculation.
Especially when the exchange is just a spot market - speculation in futures and options wouldn't undermine the viability of the currency as an actual means of exchange in the way that this situation will.
I agree, but without a credible exchange of any kind, you're left with party-to-party bartering, and no real means for pegging prices. Just like every other currency/commodity.
Quick! Somebody invent software which will allow people to have discussions that branch! Otherwise the dreadful disaster of discussion derailment will doom us daily!
There appears to be a real market demand for a currency that is not controlled by a national government, especially one that has the features of cash-like transactions. That bitcoin is lacking as an implementation is immaterial, people want it for whatever reason.
> There appears to be a real market demand for a currency that is not controlled by a national government, especially one that has the features of cash-like transactions. That bitcoin is lacking as an implementation is immaterial, people want it for whatever reason.
"We must do something, {random} is something, therefore we must do {random}" is generally regarded as a fallacy.
I decided a while ago that arguing against the "bitcoin has no problems" crowd was futile: people are too enamored with the idea to see problems like this until they happen.