Quote from: darkmule on February 15, 2014, 12:38:47 PM

Quote from: hgmichna on February 15, 2014, 06:42:40 AM

Quote from: darkmule on February 15, 2014, 12:04:43 AM

The price has already stabilized, so far as I can tell.

Yes, but at what price? The Mt. Gox dollar price is only about 60% of the Bitstamp price.

Who cares? I can get the Bitstamp price. The Gox price has been fictional for well over a year. It needs to be disregarded utterly.

Not by those who have funds on Mt. Gox. And they are many. For them it is highly interesting to predict what will happen.

Last I looked the Mt. Gox dollar price was down to near 50% of the Bitstamp price.

I am wondering what this means. Apparently people are dumping bitcoin on Mt. Gox, although bitcoin withdrawals have in the past worked very much better than fiat withdrawals. Many seem to believe that Mt. Gox is giving up and will not re-enable bitcoin withdrawals.

So far I cannot follow this line of thinking. If Mt. Gox would not fix their bitcoin withdrawals within reasonable time, they would be signing their own death certificate. It would mean and become obvious that they are fraudulently stealing the funds, which could quite literally lead to some Mt. Gox people's death.

My personal guess is that Mt. Gox will get their bitcoin withdrawals going withing a week or two. This would mean some significant outflow of bitcoins, but it would not sound Mt. Gox's death knell.

I could imagine that, given Mt. Gox's limited programming skills, they would initially process bitcoin transmissions slowly, checking transactions manually, but they cannot hold up bitcoin transfers for long. The longer it takes, the more Mt. Gox's already deeply damaged reputation would suffer.

So my personal recommendation is, if you still have fiat on Mt. Gox, buy some bitcoins. Perhaps not with all your dollars, if that is your entire pension, but at least some, hoping for the likely outcome that you will be able to pull them out soon and sell them at a higher price somewhere else.

Of course, as that happens, the price on the other exchanges will fall somewhat, which could be reinforced by early selling by others who also foresee this. But that could be temporary and can possibly be counteracted by keeping your bitcoins for a couple of weeks or months, until the waves die down.