tax was collected by the exchange as part of the transaction expense and they have done their KYC/AML on verified account. Safe so far.

My brother lives in India, I now found a route to remit money to him regularly, not only saving the remittance fee($20-50) but sometimes can still make 2% arbitrage profit. Here is how I do it:

1. I asked my brother to open an account with Unicoin(best funded exchange in the country) in India, need to go through verification process, took about a week.
2. Linked his India local bank account with Unicoin.  
3. I purchased bitcoin with Coinbase or Circle (free with linked bank account).
4. Send bitcoin to my brother Unicoin account.
5. Sell bitcoin (1% fee charge plus tax) and Unicoin will automatically deposit INR proceeds into my brother's linked bank account, normally he is able to sight the INR the same day.

Unicoin's bitcoin prices (bid) is consistently 3-5% higher than Bistamp/Coinbase/Circle's ask prices, so even after all fees, you not only remit the money for free, you still could make 1-3% profit by arbitrage.

This is the best way I ever found to remit money to India and see how bitcoin is going to be a game changer for international remittance and this is just a trivial application. Western Union is dead!





 

My friend received an email (see below) last week from Mark Karpeles of Gox asking him to close the account by signing a PDF dox (couldn't download the dox).

Anyone received the same email? it was directly from info@mtgox.com, tell me what the heck is going on:


－－－－－－－sorry, don't know how to post image/photo, anyone tell me how to post photo here, so i just extracted the text below--

From: info@mtgox.com

Dear MtGox Customers,

Please sign the papers attached, we can complete the process of closing the account and send you what the balance to another Wallet Address.

Sincerely
Mark Karpeles

February 26th 2014

unquote - -----

The biggest lesson from Gox saga is that you can't trust any exchange in their current forms. If Gox can go this wrong( with Mark a high profile public figure, Bitcoin Foundation Memeber, registered in developed market), you basicly can't trust any other (btc-e, bitstamp, coinbase);  Just keep the minimum you need for trading and store the rest offline.

All bitcoiners, withdraw all your coins from the exchanges/online wallet and keep in your own wallets (except those who need to maintain certain amount for day trading or expense), keeping coins in exchanges will only lend them more incentives to gox all your coins to the air.

All BTC exchanges/online wallet, structurally are operating a fractional reserve scheme, but without a proper protection that you could expect from a bank (which is also fractional reserve model).  

Until the industry is ready to build a distributed or reserve verifiable exchange, don't keep more coins than necessary in an exchange.

The more coins you keep in an exchange, the more likely you are aiding the emerge of the next Gox and feeding evils in the ecosystem; For bitcoin's sake, keep all your coins in your own offline wallet.

This is big lesson, all bitcoiners, withdraw all your coins from the exchanges/online wallet and keep in your own wallets (except those who need to maintain certain amount for day trading or expense), keeping coins in exchanges will only lend them more incentives to gox all your coins to the air.

All BTC exchanges/online wallet, structurally are operating a fractional reserve scheme, but without a proper protection that you could expect from a bank (which is also fractional reserve model).  

Until the industry is ready to build a distributed or reserve verifiable exchange, don't keep your coins there.

The more coins you keep in an exchange, the more likely you are aiding the emerge of the next Gox and feeding evils in the ecosystem; For bitcoin's sake, keep all your coins in your own offline wallet.

there are extensive discussions on this effort over the past week, may help to shed some transparency :

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yyrvf/open_letter_to_mark_karpeles_voluntary/
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=489949.0

there is no fucking sense that you lost 800k btc without noticing it, just like JP Morgan lost 1.9 tri dollar out of their 2 tri dollar  asset without noticing, no fucking brain in the Universe will believe this theory. Mark took all the coins, period.

what do you mean by saying "legitimate", why is it not legitimate? organizing to sue a crook is more than legitimate.

guys,

let's pool our resource together and throw Mark to jain and recover our fund, there is already an organized efforts at this site, join hands: http://www.mtgoxrecovery.com/

I would like to see Mark go to jail then we discuss about reorg. He just can't go away without punishment, i don't believe he is innocent.

couldn't  login into blockchain.info or blockchain.com for several hours now via different ips? is it down?

ok, when I tried to withdraw btc, they returned this fucking message:

"Transfer queue is currently not accepting more requests, please retry later"

Does that mean they are devising some fucking queuing system, first come first out and say put a total daily aggregate limit at 10btc for all users? then when we used up that limts(or Gox CLAIMS that the daily limit is used up, given no one really know the actual utilization of limit anyway) , then no one can withdraw. they are the most evil assholes in the Universe! fuck Gox.

ok, when I tried to withdraw btc, they returned this fucking message:

"Transfer queue is currently not accepting more requests, please retry later"

Does that mean they are devising some fucking queuing system, first come first out and say put a total daily aggregate limit at 10btc for all users? then when we used up that limts(or Gox CLAIMS that the daily limit is used up, given no one really know the actual utilization of limit anyway) , then no one can withdraw. they are the most evil assholes in the Universe! fuck Gox.

check it out yourselves, his brother is the inventor of Litecoin; he is a ABC who spent most of his life in the States before returning to China, I don't think he really knows anything about China,literally grass-root China;  he runs BTCChina like running a multinational corporate, western mentality, always be proactive in terms of being compliant of laws and regulations, no company will be able to survive in China if you are fully compliant and follow whatever the gov asks let alone to be proactively compliant,  give me a break, they are not going anywhere; just think of Ebay and Alibaba, despite Ebay's early mover advantage, it is Alibaba that dominates the Central Kingdom, eventually.

nothing to do with insolvency, they invent this shit themselves with illusion that Chinese government will treat them as good boy(i.e fully compliant sort of shit etc), but no one really cares, not even the Chinese gov. Most exchanges  just  accept deposit through banking account directly.

just switch to Huobi, waste of time to deal with BTCChina, shitty service and user interface, they lost to competitors and lost trust of their customers when they switched to charging trading fee and invented this useless voucher system; their days are gone; You won't expect any startup to be run by a foreigner to be hugely successful in China, especially for startup in this particular tricky space, they are just too off the ground, you know what i mean.

withdrawal is back, mine went through the chain, load up your guns.

Price at Gox shooting like firework now

I just did one withdrawal and it went through.

I don't understand why heck people still believe they have a better hand holding fiat in the event Gox is insolvent (legally? give me a break), it always is a cheaper solution for Gox to bail their ass out of this shit by paying BTC holder v.s fiat holder given the cheap coins they could purchase to return back to holders.

If Gox goes down, there is no way they will pay fiat holders v.s paying btc holders, if there are really insolvency holes  there, the btc hole will be the one that is easy to fill up, so forget about selling your btc and hope you could somehow withdraw fiat as your "exit strategy"; you will be trapped there forever and once btc withdrawal resume, you will be paying huge premium to buy btc at Gox to exit, hence being Goxed twice.  

there is a maintenance announcement coming up soon, look like the deposit will also be shut down in order to fix the bugs, not sure if trading will be halted or not, or maybe they completely shut down the site.

People's guess if this is the light at the end of the tunnel or just end of the tunnel without any light.