So many trolls hating on mtgox, reminds me of the 2011 spectacle. Good thing I didn't listen then, and won't listen now. Still haven't lost a single bitcoin to faulty services, unlike tradehill and bitcoinica that was promoted as 10x as safe as mtgox back then by 90% of the forum posts. I still don't get those who trust bitstamp over mtgox, but that is just my own view perhaps. Seems alot of people are confusing security with fast money transfers. Which is probably because the other exchanges don't have the same volum yet anyway .. or because they don't prioritize security over speed.
Minor point of correction. Mt. Gox did indeed lose BTC in a very real way. They sent a weeks worth of profit into a black hole once due to a coding error, and those coins are completely gone from circulation forever. They made their customers whole out of their own profits of course. Mt. Gox has also been hacked and lost data to an insider.
In contrast, Tradehill was never to my knowledge hacked. Some people claim that they were never made whole after the various Tradehill-I shutdown, but the same claim is made for every service that shuts down. All I can say is that
I received a check for my fiat balance in full and in a timely manner, and of course I had the opportunity to withdraw my BTC balance at my leisure. I never kept a BTC balance with them anyway.
At the end of the day, Tradehill made
me whole while Mt. Gox has been sitting on my $5k for three months now and there is no sign that I will ever get my funds...other than it remaining vaguely possible since they have yet to close shop and take off with the money.
Currently, Bitstamp is a shitty place to sell because more desperate small-time/crooked sellers are there pushing the price down. Bitcoin-E even worse. In any event, I would not do business with either as long as they are not up-front about who I'm entrusting funds (and more importantly, my identity doc scans) to.
Coinbase is really coming through for me as an American seller who has no criminal things going on.