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by brokenmusic 4509 days ago
In short what MtGox should've done if this was really just a technical issue:

1. Stop all deposits until the issue is resolved.

2. Stop all withdrawals and then process all those that were already made - manually.

3. Only then try and fix the bug.

4. Reopen with no fees and some other nice things for customers.

All steps should be accompanied by a statement explaining everything thoroughly. Even that course of action wouldn't necessarily restore confidence, but it wouldn't destroy their business.

If they're not doing this, it means something else is up and they are not to be trusted. At this point, their business is done anyway (unless they do the steps above like right now). The question is, will people see their BTC. My bet is not. But who knows.

2 comments

1. How do you stop bitcoin deposits? You can't stop people from sending transactions to their deposit wallets. You can maybe stop processing them, but imagine the outrage that'd cause

2. I don't think they can undo the already sent coins. If it really is because of using coinbase outputs, the transactions will confirm eventually (100 generations = ~17 hours?). Sending the money again would cause a double withdrawal.

3. Why? The faster it's fixed the less issues for them

1. At the very least take down the option from the website.

2. There are no transactions on the blockchain. All withdrawals are stuck within MtGox.

3. People who withdrew money don't care about the fix, they care about getting their money back. Start paying now or say goodbye to your business. This is no game.

Oh, I thought the transactions were already broadcasted, just weren't being confirmed?

edit: not on a blockchain means not confirmed. A transaction that's been broadcast but not confirmed yet is probably still in the transaction pool of some miners - as soon as it becomes valid, it might get confirmed even without the original sender rebroadcasting.

Sorry, I meant they're not even being broadcasted. It's all inside gox.
They are all broadcasted, mtgox even had a data URL[1] of all withdrawal tx's which aren't confirmed after 2 hours. That's how people are tracking the total stuck. The problem is that the transactions don't confirm because they are malformed, most common errors being already spent outputs or tx too large.

1. https://data.mtgox.com/api/0/bitcoin_tx.php (This URL is now defunct, supposedly replaced by a new API).

> 2. Stop all withdrawals and then process all those that were already made - manually.

Apparently they have done just that: https://www.mtgox.com/press_release_20140207.html