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Bitstamp and other exchanges resume Bitcoin withdrawals while Mt. Gox endures protest

While most Bitcoin exchanges seem ready to surpass the difficulties affecting Bitcoin withdrawals that were discovered earlier this week, the Japan-based Mt. Gox keeps falling in more than just one field.

Bitstamp released a statement this Friday (14) announcing they are going to resume Bitcoin withdrawals during the next hours. “A denial-of-service attack caused us to suspend the processing of Bitcoin withdrawals. Bitstamp, with help from the Bitcoin core developers, has implemented a solution that passes our preliminary tests and audits. After additional testing, we plan to enable Bitcoin withdraws later today”, reads the statement.

It seems the exchange has been able to implement the transaction malleability fixes released by the Bitcoin core developers during the last 24 hours, which will address the protocol aspects that made the recent DDoS attack possible.

Other exchanges besides Bitstamp are also implementing the fixes. Take the example of Bitcoin.de, which is apparently ready to go back to normal in no time thanks to the hard work of the experts.

Mark Karpeles
Mark Karpeles

Still, there seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel for Mt. Gox. The company’s CEO, Mark Karpeles, announced the exchange will implement the fixes, but provided no deadline to resume the withdrawals. He left a message a few hours ago at the Bitcoin Github repository:

We [Mt. Gox] will implement this new hash index in our transactions database and start working with it (we will announce a maintenance as we will have to stop bitcoin deposits too during the database schema update) and will start providing this new hash when customers are withdrawing Bitcoins, Litecoins or any other coin based on Bitcoin we may support in the future.

We will also provide an API that will allow our customers to use this hash to retrieve the transaction hash as seen in the blockchain once the transaction is confirmed, and will hope others will index this value one day.

We also invite other exchanges and businesses which may need to keep track of Bitcoins they send to use this same method, since dealing with multiple variations of the same thing wouldn’t be very productive.

If nobody does it, we will also post some test vectors for regular (in=>out) transactions in the near future.

In the meantime, there is a protest going on outside of Mt. Gox’s headquarters, in Tokyo. A video posted on YouTube shows a small but rather meaningful action taking place outside the building. “They seem to just have taken people’s money. They have taken my money. I’m kind of pretty annoyed about that”, one of the protesters says during the interview.

imgur.com
imgur.com

There is also an online petition currently gathering supporters in order to remove Mark Karpeles from his current position at the Bitcoin Foundation.

“Karpeles has continually proven himself to be incompetent, causing fear and damaging the trust signals that Bitcoin relies on so as to be taken seriously. We would like him to be removed from his position on the board and all association with Mt Gox to be removed from the Bitcoin Foundation website”, reads the document that can be found on Change.org.

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Bitcoincharts.com

Bitcoin’s price has been able to resist the controversy in most exchanges, but not at Mt. Gox. The company registered a decrease in value from $900, the price on February 5th, to the current $460.

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