Ok, I tried to withdraw again today after my btc got stuck and were returned to my gox account. Now it's telling me "invalid bitcoin address". I tried a few different addresses including the one I used for the first withdrawal. Anyone else getting this message?
When you copy/paste, it'll say that if there's a space at the end of the address. It's always what causes that message for me anyway.
Hmm, could be the cause. But I did not change the copy source since the first attempt to withdraw, which "worked" till the coins got stuck. I suspect they've got an empty hot wallet, as explained in some of the answers here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1x3unb/new_trick_of_mtgox_pretending_that_the_withdrawal/.
Yes. It seems that having thousands of failing transactions is just too embarrassing, so better to artificially prevent btc withdrawals by creating yet another "glitch/customer issue"
I looked at a number of the failed transactions on skanner before the api facility was stopped and it seems a lot of withdrawal transactions had several inputs, but one of which had zero balance, an initial double-spend. For example. If customers A and B both try to withdraw BTC within a few seconds of each other their payments would share one input address in common with a balance to satisfy only one customer. Whichever gets propagated through the network first has a successful withdrawal, the other is silently ignored, languishing.
For my part, if btc withdrawl is really due to a technical glitch, then they
should suspend btc withdrawls. They should have suspended them as soon as the glitch was first detected. Keeping broken half-functioning features alive scares the crap out of me personally as a customer.
Also, for what its worth, I now think that mt gox should have suspended trades and deposits (with the possible exception of Japanese yen trading)
a long time ago. Instead they should have said that they'd do their utmost to help customers get their fiat until
fiat withdrawls were fully online again and under the circumstances keeping trading operational was unprofessional.