Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Zidewinder 4800 days ago
It seems a bit fallacious to equate a Dollars-to-Bitcoins exchange with the Bitcoin currency itself. I know it's easy to forget amid this speculative frenzy, but conversion into USD is not really Bitcoin's ultimate purpose. None of these attacks have had any effect on transactions within the Bitcoin network/economy itself.
1 comments
cjh_ 4800 days ago
Quoting the mtgox homepage which in turn claims to be quoting wikipedia: "As of July 2011, Mt. Gox handles over 80% of all Bitcoin trade".

MTGOX is more than just a USD to bitcoin exchange.

link
Zidewinder 4800 days ago
No, actually, it isn't. You're quoting a piece of marketing material for chrissake. They handle 80% of all Bitcoin TRADE. As in Bitcoin-to-USD-and-vice-versa trades. Not Bitcoin-to-Bitcoin transactions.

You clearly don't have even a basic understanding of how Bitcoin itself works. It's a distributed, peer-to-peer system. That statement is analogous to saying "The Pirate Bay handles over 80% of all Bittorrent traffic." In reality, TPB handles exactly zero actual torrent traffic, and Gox is in no way involved in processing actual bitcoin blockchain transactions.

Like TBP, Gox is a convenient target for people trying to disrupt easy entry into the more robust distributed system that it provides access to. But if you already have bitcoins and simply wish to spend them, Gox could get sucked into a blackhole and it wouldn't affect you any more than a raid on TBP affects your in-progress torrent downloads.

link
Zidewinder 4800 days ago
Is there a limit on the depth of comments here? I can't seem to reply to cjh_'s adjacent post. Anyway, he's correct that it's possible to keep all your coins on a Gox-hosted wallet. I kind of forgot that people actually do that. It's a really terrible way to store your coins, even if you use a more stable/trustworthy service than theirs.

There are much better ways to utilize the convenience of a web wallet without handing all your coins over to some sketchy website, such as blockchain.info's wallet system.

link
cjh_ 4800 days ago
Yes and No. You are right in that Mt.Gox doesn't handle 80% of all btc-btc trade.

However many use Mt.Gox as their wallet so the TPB analogy doesn't quite hold that far, as Mt.Gox being taken down would mean these people wouldn't have access to their BTC funds stored in that wallet.

I should have mentioned this in my original post, but I was sloppy.

link