MtGox Sets Up Call Center For Worried Bitcoiners

An anonymous reader writes "Did you lose bitcoins in the MtGox debacle and are worried that you'll never get them back? Fear not, a call center has been set up in Japan to help allay your fears. From the article: 'Bitcoin investors left hanging by the sudden shuttering of the MtGox electronic market will soon have a way to learn more about the fate of their cryptocurrency holdings—a Japanese phone hotline. In an announcement on the company's website, MtGox said that a call center had been set up to handle inquiries about the company. The call center will go live on the morning of March 3, Japan time.'"

Moshi moshi

[MRe_nl]

Losing taught humility
Gained me Perspective
I'm a better person now

Re:Regulation of currency

[1s44c]

On the whole BitCoin fans don't think that. Maybe some naive kids who got a lot of coins by being in the right place at the right time think that. If they do it will cost them dearly. There are perfectly rational people in the BitCoin scene, people who do research and don't throw money at companies that look shady as hell like MtGox did before it blew.

It's been said many times and it deserves to be said many more - MtGox had only been paying out cash with months of delays for about a year before they went insolvent. Their death was widely predicted about a year before it happened. MtGox also has a history of very serious security issues like the time they leaked their entire user database. Hashed passwords, Usernames, Email addresses, the lot.

Re:Regulation of currency

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitcoin certainly doesn't solve all problems, but let's not forget what happened last time one big bank collapsed "in the real world": Even people who did not bank with them were robbed by their governments to prop up basically every remaining bank in the world, and the trillions of debt will continue to demand interest payments from everyone's taxes. Meanwhile in Bitcoin-land, those who acted responsibly still have all their Bitcoins, and because the money supply hasn't been increased arbitrarily to devalue everyone's assets and to use the difference to bail out those who acted most irresponsibly, the Bitcoins held by sensible people are not suddenly a smaller share of the whole pie.

Re:Regulation of currency

[delt0r]

On the whole BitCoin fans don't think that.

While there are some quite clued up people in bitcoin (ie the bitcoin FAQ on the official page), there are a lot of anti government people who really don't understand our current banking systems at all. Then of course there are lot of speculators. It could be argued they don't really care as long as they can predict.

Personally some form of ecoin appeals to me and the bitcoin system is well thought out. Its has some flaws like scalability etc and too long to confirm transactions that all could be remedied with a different set of implementation details. Perhaps what i like the best is that block chains could be used to prove the existence of something at a time in a fairly secure manner. ie hash of security camera footage, ideas book, patent applications etc.

But it has failed as a currency to date. At best is a speculative thing. And i remain unconvinced that a proof of work is a good idea. Utility of those resources is wasted and would be better spent elsewhere.

Reality Intrudes

[Required Snark]

At some point in any belief system, reality demonstrates that the system is not a complete model of how the world works. Sometimes this is minor, and sometimes it's huge. If a believer becomes even more convinced that they are right after a extreme event, they have embraced delusional thinking. (Note: one of the differences between the scientific method and other belief systems is that new results are often are used as evidence to alter the belief, i.e. hypothesis, so the belief system expands.)

There are a lot of people these days, many of them readers of Slashdot, who espouse a belief system with a lot of delusional features: Libertarianism. This position, along with the similar political belief of the U.S. Republican Party, the British Torries and Canadian Conservatives share common beliefs. One prominent belief is that all government regulation of business is always evil. They are particularly adamant that financial regulation is always destructive.

An epic recent example is the admission by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan [wikipedia.org], who is self described as "lifelong libertarian Republican".

In Congressional testimony on October 23, 2008, Greenspan acknowledged that he was "partially" wrong in opposing regulation and stated "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity – myself especially – are in a state of shocked disbelief." Referring to his free-market ideology, Greenspan said: "I have found a flaw. I don't know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact." Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) then pressed him to clarify his words. "In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working," Waxman said. "Absolutely, precisely," Greenspan replied. "You know, that's precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well." Greenspan admitted fault in opposing regulation of derivatives and acknowledged that financial institutions didn't protect shareholders and investments as well as he expected.

Matt Taibbi described the Greenspan put and its bad consequences saying: "every time the banks blew up a speculative bubble, they could go back to the Fed and borrow money at zero or one or two percent, and then start the game all over", thereby making it "almost impossible" for the banks to lose money. He also called Greenspan a "classic con man" who, through political savvy, "flattered and bullshitted his way up the Matterhorn of American power and ... jacked himself off to the attention of Wall Street for 20 consecutive years."

The failure of Mt. Gox is a inevitable consequence of an unregulated financial market. Bank failures were common in the U.S. from it's founding until modern baking regulation started after the Great Depression, when they became uncommon. This situation was stable until the Reagan Revolution, and steady removal of the previously working regulatory regime.

Greenspan is the poster child for the catastrophic effects of delusional right wing economic thinking, and the 2008 crash along with the current debt of the U.S. are the legacy. The world economy is still recovering from that disaster, and no one can say how long it will take for a full recovery. Note that the so called recovery of the financial markets is simply an extension of the policies that lead to the crash in the first place. What Matt Taibbi described is still happening: "they could go back to the Fed and borrow money at zero or one or two percent".

Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies are the high tech realization of delusional right wing economic thinking. They are ideologically founded on the idea of avoiding government economic oversight. Lack of regulation inevitably leads to a boom/bust cycle and poisons economic growth

Re:Regulation of currency

[taiwanjohn]

Real deregulation would mean repealing laws without replacements.

Just out of curiosity, what "replacement" was enacted after the repeal of Glass-Steagal?