Both p2pool and eligius.st allow coinbase payouts to any address, and for arbitrary amounts. It's entirely possible for a person to set their mining address to their deposit one, and suddenly Mt Gox has unspendable coinbase transactions in their wallet pool. People frequently assume as you did that no spends would occur of coinbase transactions, and suddenly end up with broken systems because of it.
Here's one from p2pool, paying to 402 outputs (truncated for brevity).
"in":[
{
"prev_out":{
"hash":"0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000",
"n":4294967295
},
"coinbase":"03435404062f503253482f"
}
],
"out":[
{
"value":"0.00174533",
"scriptPubKey":"OP_DUP OP_HASH160 7abdace1a0588adf6bc6673ea11ba2312285f1db OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG"
},
[......]
]
edit: oh, you mean they're unspendable for the 100 generations it takes to confirm a coinbase.
They ran a business for a few years in obscurity then when they become a central figure in potentially a massive change in financial infrastructure they decide to run off with the silver? MtGox had the potential to be worth many billions if they were a significant service provider in a successful BitCoin scenario. They possibly still do to some extent if they can get their act together.
2 days is nothing, I presume you also refuse to bank with any standard US bank? Bank of America holds wire transfers for like 4 days.
So, for instance, with the fiat withdrawal problem, if the actual issue is that they are not solvent, but are hiding this fact in order to become so through trading fees (a popular theory), then they are shifting an extraordinary amount of risk on to the customer without his/her consent. That would represent willful misleading for their own gain.
I would generally agree, but the calculus changes slightly for banking.
But it feels like they've been having withdrawl issues for like a year now, and since they haven't made any public statements about what's actually happening and what steps they are taking to rectify it, I've completely lost faith.
If MtGox needs frehsly mined coins to keep their exchange alive, they are probably dead. When and at which price did they spend their client's bitcoins so that now they have to rely on mining new ones?
Anyway, how does the pool know the address you gave it is a mtgox deposit address rather than a personal address of yours?
Firstly it has been claimed that they have freshly mined coins stored undistinguished from others. If someone withdraws an amount that draws from an address with new coins, that withdrawal will be delayed.
I'm not sure how those freshly minted coins get to MtGox in the first place (any such transfer would presumably be delayed). Assuming they do have freshly minted coins in their pools, That would be consistent of some short term delays. I have experienced delays that fit this model where a Hash for the transaction has been provided but the transfer does not arrive at the other end for a few hours. Anything affected by this mechanism shouldn't be delayed beyond 17ish hours.
There are transactions not going though for longer periods, The transaction hash is being provided. I have seen claims suggesting that transactions are failing because of a subtle protocol incompatibility, which would explain the fairly random nature of the failed transactions.
Lots of people are saying MtGox is out of funds and the sky is falling. The biggest problem with those claims is that people have been predicting the imminent demise of MtGox for quite some time. MtGox may be failing, but everything that happens cannot be a sign of imminent collapse if it keeps on going.
I'm not sure if the claims of MtGox running a fractional reserve on the sly are very valid. I think it's more likely that they have technical issues, but the very nature of Bitcoin means that they could potentially lose all their bitcoin through technical issues alone. If you lose a private key or transfer bitcoin to an address with a lost key, those coins are effectively gone. If your software isn't behaving it's quite possible to make an automated money shredder.
It's fairly obvious that at this point they need to do some fairly significant steps to demonstrate that they are in control of enough bitcoin. If they want to restore confidence in their ability to pay out, they should use Bitcoin's ability to demonstrate ownership to do just that. Restoring confidence in their ability to operate is going to be a longer road.