Re:MtGox.com is offline
by baddox on Tuesday February 25, 2014 @02:15PM
(#7299742)
Did you really? I literally don't think I've ever seen anyone recommend MtGox outside of mass media reports, but I might be wrong. I remember seeing online conversations (I think it was either a forum or IRC) from 3 or 4 years ago where the people making MtGox were basically bragging about how incompetent they are, and everyone else was doing a collective facepalm. As far as I can tell, they got a first-mover advantage, which got them into basically every media mention of Bitcoin, which compounded and led to them being the largest exchange for a long time. But my honest impression is that the Bitcoin community has been wary of MtGox for essentially as long as it has existed.
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Yes, the old Bitcoin community. But as you may have noticed, bitcoin got a lot of attention over the past year, and probably drew in a lot of users who weren't on that forum 3 or 4 years ago. All those mass media reports weren't immediately followed by warnings from the community to stay away from MtGox, so a lot of new Bitcoin users probably ended up at the biggest (and therefore presumably the most professional and reliable) exchange.
How could MtGox have been so big if everybody already knew for years that it was crap? The community failed to inform the new users about this very real danger.