Mt Gox announces maintenance, price almost drops to $300
Panicky behavior of Bitcoin investors is wreaking havoc across the market, especially at Mt Gox. According to current data provided by Bitcoincharts.com price divergence between Mt Gox and BitStamp is close to 85%. For every Bitcoin you are holding at Mt Gox you could get (assuming you are able to withdraw it) $339 as of writing. On the other hand your Bitcoins are worth $649 at BitStamp – a massive divergence that supports the view that Mt Gox is now a separate Bitcoin economy.
It was only a year ago when the Japanese exchange has been accountable for about 80% of the total transactions volumes and that share has been declining day by day. Many users have seen this as a long time coming since they haven’t been able to withdraw their funds (particularly problematic in North America).
Mt Gox has essentially become a separate economy by itself and there is no amount of news that can restore credibility in the abilities of the exchange. Only an outright resumption of withdrawals will sport for a comeback and it seems quite unlikely to occur at this point in time.
Early Saturday morning the exchange has issued a press release detailing that it will undergo a 6-hr maintenance period between 9am and 3 pm GMT in order to resolve the issue with “transaction malleability” that was uncovered last week. Last week according to the exchange the signature that is responsible to cover the data within a transaction was not actually covering it at all times. That resulted in faulty transactions and Mt Gox has suspended Bitcoin withdrawals until the issue was fixed.
While trading should go on as usual during the 6 hour maintenance period (whatever that means these days) the fix will be affecting deposits (not that anyone is depositing anything) and internal Bitcoin transfers. According to Mt Gox the period could go on for longer than 6 hours and once its complete clients would be able to deposit again. We would reiterate here that not many people care about that option – everybody is rather waiting for information on withdrawals resumption.
According to the press release a temporary fix has been issued by BlockChain.info to address “transaction malleability”, while a longer term solution is in the works by the Bitcoin Core Dev team and the Bitcoin Foundation. Stay tuned to LeapRate for more news on this one.
For a link to the full press release visit Mt Gox’s website.
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