Hacker News Reader

Comment by fatbat | Hacker News Reader

Considering how volatile bitcoins are, any downtime DDoS or not, affect users a great deal. Unlike NASDAQ that can rollback/shutdown the market, MtGox has to maintain 24/7/365. I dare say their market's uptime is more critical than the regular stock market. I wonder how their stack is setup. Anyone from MtGox?

View on HN

> Unlike NASDAQ that can rollback/shutdown the market, MtGox has to maintain 24/7/365. I dare say their market's uptime is more critical than the regular stock market.

You are trivializing the real markets. What makes you think this is something that NASDAQ can just "do"? They had a system problem causing delays on Facebook's IPO, and they're still dealing with the shit-storm from that now. Everyone who had poor executions (or missed executions) as a result of the delay is trying to get compensation from the exchange for their technical problem. I haven't checked the exact number recently, but I want to say $21MM is the pool that the exchange has to puke to the "plaintiffs".

Because bitcoin exchanges are not regulated in the same fashion as stock exchanges, I doubt that MtGox will be on the hook for anyone's poor executions.

> I wonder how their stack is setup.

As someone else pointed out, their stack is setup wrong if account management has _any_ impact on their matching engine. Hopefully, it was just the web servers which host both accounts-management and trading UIs. Regardless, there was clearly some resource-sharing which should not have happened.

the fact that they can have issues doesn't mean they cannot suspend a stock as part of normal operations if they rise or fall too fast. At least, most stock markets seem to be doing it without issues most of the time.

>but I want to say $21MM is the pool that the exchange has to puke to the "plaintiffs".

This is actually back in the news. And the value that the banks are looking to recover is closer to $500MM.

http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/UBS_unimpressed_with_Fa...

Well, MtGox proved me wrong earlier today. :) Matter of fact, still down now.

Also I still think it would be interesting to see their setup, wrong or not.

Well when everyone only trades through one website this is what happens.

I trade at another exchange that's inside the SEPA zone, has a 6x lower fee, and doesn't require ridiculous amounts of papers to verify yourself (which is illegal to request without a permit from the Dutch CBP, but I can hardly object because then I simply can't transfer fiat currency out of gox). The trading lag was also much lower there.

But are the other markets as rabid as MtGox? I think that is why alot of people even put up with the higher fees.

Also when MtGox comes back online in ~3 hours I believe we will be in for some more bot action manipulation, especially with the temporary fee waive now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com