| I will say that the article you linked is almost garbage. It glances over the "clues" very quickly which I will assume due to lack of knowledge. The complaint that passwords were displayed in plain text is not anywhere near recent. Even in 2011 when I started using MtGox, passwords were hashed. Granted, early on the passwords were only hashed with 1 pass of SHA256, but later on passwords were stored to much better standards. How do I know this? Because they got hacked twice in 2011, both through SQL vulns. Once a database dump being leaked, and another time a user's account balance was changed and the attacker cleared the bid side of the market book. Trades were rolled back, and MtGox took the loss; nothing remote of this severity ever happened again. Another thing I do remember [is this](http://imgur.com/xMeW43a), and it seems much more aligned to what the article is talking about. But seriously, look at the URL. The only issue is when someone looks at that user's browsing history, but even this wasn't an issue in 2011. -- Banking problems were not apparent until last year. It was well understood that banks and Bitcoin exchanges had harsh relationships. Bitfloor, the most popular US-based exchange was shut down due to banking problems; they were unable to find any banking partner that were willing to accept them. MtGox having delays in fiat withdrawals were understandable since it was by far the biggest exchange. -- Most people who call us idiots for not connecting the dots earlier are those who haven't been here long enough. For many of us, MtGox went down over the years but all to recover. Both Luke-Jr and gmaxwell (core dev) had a significant sum of coins stored on MtGox too. It shows the trust we had in MtGox over the years. -- One last thing though, is that I will attribute Bitstamp's late popularity causing them to dodge a bullet. The reason MtGox had written their own bitcoin implementation was because the bitcoin reference client was unable to handle their volume of Bitcoin transactions at the time. Transaction malleability was documented, but not well known issue for Bitcoin. Even the reference Bitcoin client was affected. So the fatal flaw that MtGox's implementation made when resending transactions (because a different transaction id was accepted and their system did not see it) was it did not reuse the same inputs when resending the transaction. In the reference bitcoin client (bitcoind), it makes sure to use at least one of the same coin inputs, so if the original transaction (but different tx id) did get accepted into the network, the client would attempt to resend using the same input, but it would get rejected by the network because it was a double spend. |
I've been a spectator for quite a few years and after their first hack I was out of MtGox. It was tempting to go back, but time-and-time again they proved their incompetence to a degree that I was not going to risk my holdings. They are amateurs and I have my doubts as to whether they've properly applied any knowledge they've gained over the years.