Paybase and GAW Miners founder Josh Garza has defended accusations his exchange has “gone full Mt Gox” after withdrawals were suspended without notice for a week.
The latest in a series of what Silicon Angle now terms “dubious business activities” has been marked by users being unable to reach deposited funds, with requests for clarification going unanswered. CEO Garza broke the silence Monday in a response to a tweet linking to a Reddit thread discussing the issue, where one user likened his operations to the implosion of Mt Gox in 2013.
@The_BitCoiner 7 days? Full Mt Gox? That's a pretty aggressive claim. Withdraws have already been going out
— Josh Garza (@gawceo) March 23, 2015
Despite Garza’s apparent confirmation that funds were moving once again, reports of withdrawals being unobtainable are still surfacing. The reaction from both the consumer and media communities has been notably one of little surprise.
“How could this possibly surprise anyone?” the most popular Reddit response by user u/blackmarble reads.
Similarly, both Vice and Silicon Angle report on the long history of complications to have affected both of Garza’s operations over the past year. Garza himself has at times taken an active role in defense of his practices, which ultimately served to cast deeper suspicion about his motives when an ongoing investigation by Coinfire was most recently met with legal threats.
Aside from the Twitter response, however, the present operational issues have only been met with a forum post reiterating that withdrawals were being processed. “There should be a resolution today,” Garza wrote Monday.
The history of the problems and criticisms pertaining to Garza’s operation of GAW Miners and Paybase has become lengthy enough as to be difficult to comprehend without extensive research. Most significantly, an investigation by the Securities and Exchanges Commission, a major focus of the Coinfire investigation, is still ongoing.
While commentators are still divided as to how the situation will be resolved, the notion that Garza himself is linked to unscrupulous practices appears to have become deeply rooted. Most recently, in a statement defending Garza’s right to speak at the North American Bitcoin Conference in Miami in January, founder Moe Levin began by mentioning the accusations directly.
“Our role is not to encourage witch hunts. Our role is not to promote scams,” he wrote.
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