Bitcoin Plunges After Mt. Gox Exchange Halts Trades 249
krakman writes with this excerpt from Bloomberg News: "Bitcoin plunged more than 8 percent [Friday] after a Tokyo-based exchange halted withdrawals of the digital currency, citing technical malfunction. Mt. Gox, claimed in a blog post it needed to 'temporarily pause on all withdrawal requests to obtain a clear technical view of the currency processes.' It promised an 'update' — not a reopening — on Monday, Feb. 10, Japan time. This is day after Russia's Prosecutor General concluded Bitcoin and other digital currencies are illegal under current law."
To explain what seems to have been missed. (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, apparently if all "mining" stops then that will prevent transactions from occurring and render the tokens worthless. Whenever this has been brought up before the response of people involved in the scheme has been "mining will never stop", and the question otherwise ignored.
Re:Looks more like manipulation (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe it is called a "stress test", one of the techniques that banks use to test the resilience of a trading system and how much liquidity it has. If they suddenly shutdown the exchange of currency, the punters are forced to make trades using other resources. How much of that other currency is used gives an idea of how is available. The Russians and EU did the same by restricting physical money currency transfers. The EU figured out there was black market the size of the GDP of the entire region.
Re:Magic the Gathering Online Exchange (Score:4, Interesting)
When Germany invaded Denmark in World War II, Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of German physicists Max von Laue (1914) and James Franck (1925) in aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from confiscating them. The German government had prohibited Germans from accepting or keeping any Nobel Prize after jailed peace activist Carl von Ossietzky had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935. De Hevesy placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. It was subsequently ignored by the Nazis who thought the jar—one of perhaps hundreds on the shelving—contained common chemicals. After the war, de Hevesy returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The gold was returned to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation. They re-cast the medals and again presented them to Laue and Franck.
"Destroyed", but, no, not really.
Re:Enough with this "fuck beta" nonsense. (Score:4, Interesting)
Grow the fuck up and stop spamming the comments. The grown ups want to discuss the news.
What a childish thing to say. When I was younger and naive I thought that voting and going through proper channels was how people changed the systems that govern them or otherwise affect their lives. When I became an adult, I put away childish idealism and threw out the narrative fairy tales of the indoctrinators. Once I let only observation and fact shape my thinking I was able to clearly see that voting doesn't matter. [snagfilms.com] The systems are rigged. [snagfilms.com] If you do not know this, then you are ignorant of history. The rulers react only to save face when confronted with loud and vocal and persistent protest. Just look at the majority of changes enacted by the world's peoples.
It is been made painfully and bluntly apparent that here at slashdot we do not even have the illusion of a vote. We therefore use our voices as it is all we still have, for now. Fuck Beta. The grown ups know how the world works better than some ignorant, complacent, and short sighted children. Rarely do rulers actually know what's good for the people they rule, and nearly universally do they reject the Scientific Method -- a means by which they could discover the correct course of action! This is because they care not for what's best for the people. We have to make them care. It is the very grown ups who see in longer terms and are willing to sacrifice the comments here for a while if it means there's a chance we may not let the community be destroyed. Extract your head from your ass: The beta makes discussion of the news difficult. A few weeks of pain is nothing compared to eternity.