If you trusted a company that started out trading Magic: the Gathering cards with a significant amount of your money, you probably need the lesson you are going to learn from this.
Your already spurious analogy is extra terrible because nobody deposits hundreds of thousands of dollars with eBay.
Paypal, OTOH, started out as a financial service and was designed as one from the beginning, and proven itself reliable. But even so, most people know not to leave large amounts of money in their Paypal accounts, and to make regular deposits into a proper bank account.
What you are saying is "Don't use mtgox because one of its founders that has no role in the company once thought about doing magic the gathering cards exchange".
The site never really worked as a cards exchange.
However, I agree that given Mt. Gox record of fuck ups, I would never put any large sums there.
That's like saying "The government stole my car from the valet who was driving it without a license". Mt.Gox knew they needed a license, that's been made extremely clear. The only reason they are still operating at all is because Japanese authorities are asleep at the wheel.
If it's like you say, then people are supposed to go to the government to recover their funds. Unfortunately, govt won't give them a cent. It's like you live on a street where mafia requires valets to "buy" a license. You happen to give your car to a valet who forgot to "buy" a license from mafia. Then mafia seizes your car from the valet and you get upset. Why blame the valet if it's better to not have a mafia in the first place?
Oh, I forget. Mafia dictates what's good for your health and educates your children because it gives you a great service: protection against other mafias. And the price for that service is not fixed. You have to give up half of your income.
My point was not whether they were "stealing" their money, it's that they weren't an entity you should be trusting with substantial amounts of money. Whether they lost it by malicious action, inept accident or by themselves being stomped on by some larger entity (the government in this case), it was/is foolish to trust an organization like Mtgox with lots of your money.
It's kind of impressive that they can just lose 5 million like that and go on doing business. Actually I don't know if impressive is the word I was looking for...
As long as some portion of that $5M eventually goes towards licensure and bonding, or is returned, I'm counting it as forward progress to have that money seized.
I don't know the likelihood of that honestly but I would certainly be more ashamed of my own government than already this month if it was simply "appropriated" and not returned or counted.
Hardly. They make about 1% of their volume. At 20K volume (about what they see these days), and $120/BTC, That's about $24,000 a day in revenue, half of which is USD. About $4.3M a year in USD. They just had $5M locked up.
They're surviving because they're not letting go of any of the USD they have, or at a trickle. I've heard numbers along the lines of they had $10M in April. They can't pay salaries and infrastructure costs in BTC, so they're holding on to what $ they have for as long as they can. Eventually they'll have to start releasing their BTC into the market to get $ out, but they know that will have a negative effect.
The company did not start out trading MtG cards. Mtgox's founder launched mtgox using a domain name that he once used for a MtG site. The founder then sold the company to Mark Karpeles, the current owner.
It's not. The original commenter insinuated that the site was somehow inferior do to a history of selling playing cards. As it's just the domain name that was reused, there's clearly no association at all. A name is a name is a name.
Not quite. They are two distinct business ventures linked by the operator and name. The name is irrelevant, and the operator clearly ran them as distinct entities.
Actually, yes, both are substantially different from Bitcoin. Both stock and futures contracts carry legal weight -- basically they are contracts and their value is ultimately a result of their legal meaning, despite all the speculators you hear about. From time to time you can see news about shareholder lawsuits or elections of corporate leadership. Companies often use futures contracts to reduce the risk of buying raw materials (fuel, food, etc.) for their operations.
Anybody who trusts THOSE idiots with their money deserves to lose it.
Howabout those dorks that started out as a school project and went on to become google.
You'd be double, double stupid to work for, trust money to, advertise on that stupid dorky company that started off as a hott or not clone.