MtGox Bitcoin wallet address

(Update: Withdrawals still pending as MtGox blames flaw in bitcoin protocol)

On Friday,MtGox announced that it was temporarily halting all withdrawals,both small and large,to work out their technical issue that they claim is hampering the processing of bitcoin transactions. Delays in bitcoin denominated withdrawals have been reported by customers since the end of January,while fiat based processing has been a problem since the middle of 2013. Before the halt,customers who had attempted to initiate bitcoin withdrawals of large sizes (at least greater than one bitcoin),were seeing their requests being stuck.

Exact reasons for the problems are unknown,but within forums and on Reddit,one of the prevailing theories is due to a technical glitch in MtGox’s custom bitcoin wallet. Over the weekend,core bitcoin developer,Gregory Maxwell provided his take on Reddit. According to his opinion,patches that MtGox had created to deal with design flaws in the bitcoin protocol may have led to certain transactions having invalid signatures that weren’t picked up by the bitcoin network (best understood by reading Maxwell’s explanation). In his opinion,Maxwell didn’t believe that MtGox was insolvent due to “the technical background doesn’t support this conclusion”,but even after fixing its code would be facing an “accounting mess to clean up.”

Beyond the technical glitches,the company appears to also be the target of investigations regarding Bitinstant and Silk Road which are limiting their ability to provide withdrawals to certain customers. In addition to a formal statement in relation to Bitinstant,MtGox Manager of Business Development,Gonzague Gay-Bouchery,.