The ongoing exodus from Mt.Gox - a major Bitcoin exchange - amid withdrawal halts, has seen a massive $150 spread open up between it and other exchanges. Having tumbled by over 50% in the last 2 weeks, Mt. Gox pricing is back at levels first seen 3 months ago. This chaos (and the ongoing 'finger-pointing' over who is to blame) had led Mt.Gox CEO Mark Karpeles [3] to come out swinging in the following interview...
Mt.Gox price for Bitcoin has collapsed...
[4]
Leaving the exchanges with very different prices...
[5]
Via Forbes,
FORBES: Was Mt Gox’s coding to blame, and are other exchanges having the same problem?
Mark Karpeles: First, you need to understand that the Bitcoin implementation we use in MtGox was created back in 2011. The bitcoin client is not meant to handle the kind of load MtGox has and was having more and more troubles, lagging and crashing. We created our own implementation to solve those issues and to offer a better flexibility to our customers.
Over time Bitcoin changed and started implementing changes that would require people using previous versions of the software to upgrade. While we followed most of those update[s] we were more and more busy and couldn’t keep up with all the changes.
With bitcoin 0.8.0 (released 19 feb 2013) a breaking change has been included that would prevent transactions to be accepted if their signature did not include the right number of zeroes in front of the signature values (in an effort to reduce risks of transaction malleability). We did not notice this change but a few of the transactions we were sending would become invalid because of this.
Due to this fact we started being more transparent on the transactions we sent, and provide a publicly available list of pending transactions. Nobody was however able to tell us what went wrong at that time. Since only a few transactions were affected anyway we didn’t give it much attention (recently we were able to look more into this and fix this issue).
This meant however that some of our invalid transactions were listed publicly, making it rather easy for someone with bad intention to alter these, hence the reason why many people claim there was an issue in our code. Now, transaction malleability does not affect only us, and while it might be more difficult to affect exchanges using regular bitcoin[s], it remains rather trivial.
Is there anything the Bitcoin Foundation can do to help solve this problem?
The Bitcoin Foundation has hired Bitcoin Developers for the purpose of promoting Bitcoin use. I guess the most puzzling part is why this issue hasn’t be[en] solved since 2011.
What constructive steps are both the Bitcoin Foundation and Mt Gox taking together to resolve the issues, and to have everything working at its best for the future?
We have proposed a solution that would allow people sending bitcoins to track sent coins no matter what happens in terms of malleability (a solution that can be applied quickly and without breaking anything), and the Bitcoin developers are preparing ways to prevent modified transactions from being relayed by the network (which will take a lot of time and may break some bitcoin custom clients).
There is obviously no perfect solution in this world, however this is how things are as of today.
Note that our announce[ment], while unfortunately upsetting a lot of people, allowed other exchanges to be much more cautious when faced with failing transactions, and most likely helped a lot of people understanding and dealing with the problem.