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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

Lots of people in the Bitcoin community have been saying for years to not touch MtGox with a ten foot pole.

The problem is they also say this about every exchange. It was enough for me to send half my btc to coinbase, but not enough to warrant any real urgency about it. Thus I lost about 7 btc due to this fiasco.

You should not leave your coins on any exchange. Store them locally - offline preferably.

Not loudly enough. I remember reading lots of stuff about how Mt. Gox was where it's at.

Did you really? I literally don't think I've ever seen anyone recommend MtGox outside of mass media reports, but I might be wrong. I remember seeing online conversations (I think it was either a forum or IRC) from 3 or 4 years ago where the people making MtGox were basically bragging about how incompetent they are, and everyone else was doing a collective facepalm. As far as I can tell, they got a first-mover advantage, which got them into basically every media mention of Bitcoin, which compounded and led to them being the largest exchange for a long time. But my honest impression is that the Bitcoin community has been wary of MtGox for essentially as long as it has existed.

Yes, the old Bitcoin community. But as you may have noticed, bitcoin got a lot of attention over the past year, and probably drew in a lot of users who weren't on that forum 3 or 4 years ago. All those mass media reports weren't immediately followed by warnings from the community to stay away from MtGox, so a lot of new Bitcoin users probably ended up at the biggest (and therefore presumably the most professional and reliable) exchange.

How could MtGox have been so big if everybody already knew for years that it was crap? The community failed to inform the new users about this very real danger.

It's my genuine impression of the Bitcoin community, nothing more.

So "lots of people" suddenly became "My impression"

Well, yes. All I have to go on is my own observations. I have observed a large number of people in the Bitcoin community disparage MtGox for a long time. Not sure what else you want me to say.

In this case, his impression of lots of people is correct. People that have been around bitcoin for long enough have seen ridiculous things happen at Mt Gox repeatedly.

Plenty of threads on HN.

for the sake of argument (I have no position in this, but I have read plenty of these):

[0] http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1orvkc/do_not_use_m...

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=313359.0

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6263425#up_6264944

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