Daily volumes of BTC trade to/from USD and other national currencies (in kBTC):


             !   Wed !    Thu !    Fri !    Sat !    Sun !    Mon !    Tue !    Wed !    Thu !
  EXCHANGE   ! 02/05 !  02/06 !  02/07 !  02/08 !  02/09 !  02/10 !  02/11 !  02/12 !  02/13 ! Currencies considered

  MtGOX      |  8.20 |  21.54 |  58.89 |  26.82 |  23.48 |  50.07 |  18.70 |  25.21 |  33.85 | USD,EUR,GBP,AUD,JPY
  Bitstamp   |  8.48 |  20.65 |  42.79 |  13.50 |  15.06 |  71.86 |  40.06 |  15.51 |  28.15 | USD
  BTC-e      |  6.55 |   9.72 |  31.84 |  11.67 |  12.51 |  47.04 |  28.64 |   9.97 |  18.53 | USD,EUR,RUR
  BitFinEx   |  5.22 |  21.11 |  66.36 |  11.12 |  12.07 |  41.98 |  39.54 |  12.85 |  17.17 | USD
  Kraken     |  0.23 |   0.59 |   1.45 |   0.37 |   0.45 |   1.45 |   1.11 |   0.58 |   0.93 | EUR
  Bitcoin.DE |  0.31 |   0.61 |   1.30 |   0.37 |   0.47 |   1.54 |   0.67 |   0.51 |   0.78 | EUR
  CaVirtEx   |  0.18 |   0.39 |   1.07 |   0.57 |   0.23 |   0.77 |   0.53 |   0.29 |   0.41 | CAD
  CampBX     |  0.16 |   0.21 |   0.82 |   0.27 |   0.24 |   0.37 |   0.11 |   0.10 |   0.21 | USD

  SUBTOTAL   | 29.33 |  74.82 | 204.52 |  64.69 |  64.51 | 215.08 | 129.36 |  65.02 | 100.03 |

  Huobi      | 19.55 |  39.97 | 131.91 |  77.00 |  64.08 | 134.09 | 120.08 | 131.86 |  82.39 | CNY
  OKCoin     | 12.33 |  26.07 |  74.37 |  37.63 |  34.63 |  70.49 |  64.22 |  60.79 |  62.49 | CNY
  BTC-China  |  1.54 |   4.09 |  17.66 |   6.86 |   5.75 |  18.23 |  11.17 |  11.01 |   8.02 | CNY

  SUBTOTAL   | 33.42 |  70.13 | 223.94 | 121.49 | 104.46 | 222.81 | 195.47 | 203.66 | 152.90 |

  TOTAL      | 62.75 | 144.95 | 428.46 | 186.18 | 168.97 | 437.89 | 324.83 | 268.68 | 252.93 |



All numbers were collected by hand from the site http://bitcoinwisdom.com. Beware of possible errors.

For each exchange, the numbers include only the trade volume to/from the currencies listed in the rightmost column. Trade between BTC and other cryptocoins, such as LiteCoin, is NOT included.

Coinbase is said to use Bitstamp for currency conversion.

Dates on the header line are UTC. Specifically, "01/15" means "from 01/15 00:00:00 UTC to 01/15 23:59:59 UTC". (Beware that Bitcoinwisdom uses your local time, so the date may appear to be off by 1 day.  For example, if you are 2 hours west of Greenwich, it may show "01/14 22:00" when the UTC time is "01/15 00:00".)

Why, to go TO DA MOON, of coooourse...  Stupid of me. 

Well, in hiragana it would be Na. Sa., but why would NASA start this bitcoin thing? 

In Japan people usually write the family name first, so his name woud be written "Nakamoto Satoshi", or "N. Sa." for short. 

That is money and bitcoins in the internal client accounts.   MtGox may have enough in their corporate bank accounts and wallets to make good on the client accounts.  Or may not have. Or may even owe money to their bank.  There is no way to tell.

However, MtGOX is definitely behaving in all respects as if it were insolvent.  Perhaps their CEO is just aiming for an Emmy award.

Banks and publicly traded corporations are required to publish audited and detailed balances every quarter.  Crypto exchanges will not even provide unaudited statements of how much they owe to their clients.  How can anyone trust those outfits?

They do not show the whole order book, which must be huge.  Presumably they show only the first N entries on each side, that span only a few hundred CNY up and down.

Huobi is still trading like crazy, and this is already their largest daily volume ever (more than 200,000 BTC traded).

And it is 50,000 BTC more than the highest daily trading volume ever at any other exchange.

"We pocketed your X coins/dollars and we have credited Y dollars/coins to your account at this exchange.  Some day we may let you take these out."

Only if you compare it to some wannabe fiat currency that keeps swinging like crazy.

Compared to a real honest fiat currency, it seems to be doing well:

https://coinplorer.com/Charts?fromCurrency=DOGE&toCurrency=USD

That may actually be true true, like "Pigs will fly when they grow wings".


Actually the market did not care much for MtGOX's troubles, and if they had folded on feb/10 it would probably not make a dent on the charts.  It was their CEO who, single mouthed, brought the price down by claiming that the protocol was broken.

Let's se if understood correctly.  The "malelability" of transaction requests can cause two problems:

  * First, old or custom wallet software may broadcast out "non-canonical" transaction requests (like writing "$020,0" on
    check instead of "$20,00").

    Such requests were originally accepted by the bitcoin network, but  a few months ago the protocol was tightened
    and they started being rejected.

    An exchange that issued such a request in order to execute bitcoin withdrawals by clients had to either re-issue the transaction
    request, or cancel the withdrawal and credit back those bitcoins to the client's account.  If the exchange did either of these
    two things, the result would be only annoyance to clients as their withdrawals were delayed or failed.
   
    If the exchange did not do either of those things, the bitcoins would be subtracted from the client's account but would remain
    in the exchange's own wallet.  If the exchange also failed do proper accounting (which it probably did, or else it would have detected the
    problem), it may have believed that the apparent BTC surplus  (bitcoins in its own wallet minus sum of all bitcoins in the clients accounts)
    was its profit from fees; and therefore converted that surplus into dollars to pay for expenses and dividends.  In extreme situations,
    the exchange may become insolvent (unable to produce enough bitcoins and dollars to honor all its client's accounts.)

  * Second, some hackers exploited the malleability to steal coins from any exchange that issued non-canonical requests.
   
    The hacker would open an account at the exchange, put some bitcoins there, and request a withdrawal. He would then watch
    for the corresponding transaction request as it was broadcast by the exchange, and would broadcast a mutated copy (like
    changing "$020" to "$20").  The network would execute the "canonical" version and reject the original for being non-canonical (and
    also an attempted double spend). 

    The exchange would then think that the transaction had failed, and therefore would either re-try it, or cancel the withdrawal and
    credit back the coins to the hacker's account.  In the first case the hacker would get the withdrawal executed two or more times
    but debited only once; in the second case he would get the withdrawal executed without his account being debited.  Repeat
    to taste.

    Again, this hack could be spotted imediately if the exchange kept proper accounting, as it would notice that the coins
    were taken out from its own wallet in spite of the transaction being apparently rejected.

Is this understanding correct?

If so, does anyone know whch exchanges had which of these problems, and how many bitcoins  they overspent or had stolen?

It seems that for MtGOX the amount involved is at least 50,000 BTC or more, and one of those two problems had been occurring for several months.  How could they fail to notice and diagnose such a big problem?

According that Financial Times article, it seems that the bylaws of the Foundation required every board member to attend the meetings, but the Foundation then voted to dispense Karpeles from that requirement. 

They would have to ship him an electric beach-ball seat. 

Bitcoinwisdom still shows trading going on as usual.

So the Bitcoin Foundation has suspended the withdrawal of board members?

"Fortunately" the DDOS attack did not prevent deposits.

If, hypothetically speaking, MtGOX had lost most of its clients' coins due to theft or mismanagement, this price excursion could, hypothetically speaking, save their skin.  MtGOX could buy the (non-existent) cheap coins in their clients' accounts by a small fraction of the money that those clients spent on them.  Thus they would turn their hypothetical huge debt to their clients into big losses by their clients, with their implicit consent.

At the same time, hypothetically speaking, MtGOX would be grabbing the dollars of naive investors who buy coins there, attracted by the low price, only to learn that they cannot take the coins out nor have their money back.

I do not know anything about Mr. Andresen and the other people in the Foundation, except that they were close friends of Shrem and Karpeles and still seem reluctant to disown them.  Makes one wonder whether the Foundation has any regards for ethics, even basic business ethics.  Or whether the "Bitcoin community" itself knows what the word means.

Excellent, Huobi, 3750 Yuan.  Now stop RIGHT THERE and go to bed.

Even those that are being kept on an encrypted laptop buried below the swimming pool in the backyard?

Frankly I would rather see Choo Choo trains and pics of dead bulls and bears on this thread than comments about MtGOX's price...

By the way, I enjoyed this photo gallery that the Financial Times assembled last June:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/910858fa-d3bf-11e2-95d4-00144feab7de.html

And I found this on that article:

"Citing rules designed to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing, the US federal government has seized bank accounts belonging to Mt Gox, the largest Bitcoin exchange, and other exchanges. The Bitcoin Foundation no longer expects Mark Karpeles, Mt Gox chief executive, to travel to the US from Japan for its board meetings."

Should we understand that he fears to be arrested if he put foot on US soil?