if you think the bitcoin market will actually self-regulate without some kind of mandatory government sponsored agency that will impose changes upon the exchanges and institutions behind bitcoin in the interest of looking out for all stakeholders you are dreaming.

Yeah Wall Street works GREAT and is beneficial to everyone.

Mt. Gox disappears as Bitcoin community goes into damage control mode | The Verge

Hope none of you bought it cheap lol

Damnnn 350 million, pooof

Bitcoin Exchange Mt. Gox Goes Offline Amid Allegations of $350 Million Hack | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

This day February 25, 2014. Worst day in Bitcoin's history. I am sad for all the Gox customers who had lose their coins and funds.

This actually strengthen my belief that a NEW "The Bitcoin Foundation" should be elected and then should regulate all Bitcoin exchanges to prevent such "idiocy" from happening.

This is way too many coins too ignore.

Gox is dead, so there will be another chance to buy in at a good price really soon.

The media coverage will probably be brutal. Bitcoin is dying, bitcoin doesn't work, etc. The truth is, this is just one poorly run company that happened to deal with bitcoin that failed. They happened to be the first, so had the biggest numbers and most coverage. As I stated a year ago when this thread was new, people should avoid going there.. that is what I learned as I started researching exchanges and bitcoin in more depth.

What will come of this is NOT regulation. That is NOT what needs to be done.

What will come of this is customers demanding a lot more transparency from exchanges. We are still at pretty much day 1 with Bitcoin, maybe day 2. The good, reputable companies will rise to the top, and the shit ones will die and be forgotten. Unfortunately this one took a lot of people out with them, but again, the warnings were there. I do feel bad for those who lost their money, but come on

So what happens to all the lost bitcoins from Gox? Do they somehow get 'reabsorbed' to be mined again?

Explain it to a noob please lol

Rob and run yall!
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I am not talking about regulation: regulation.

I am talking about Bitcoin self regulating. Transparency is key for all exchange. Bring in new customers and showing that the exchange is solid and liquid.

The thieves will just use them for whatever they want.. They've been leeching from Gox for years, so chances are they have been selling them for fiat the whole time, and holding onto some of it as well. In this way, it sort of gets 'reabsorbed' naturally.

Well when people say regulation, they usually mean by some governing body... That won't happen in bitcoin.

But yes, self regulation. The "good guys" will come out on top. BECAUSE there is no regulation .

In other words, if a company is shitty like Gox, it dies. If there was regulation of some sort, the government would step in and bail them out. They will continue to run a shitty service, and possibly lose everyone's money again.

In this case, they just die. The market takes care of itself by moving to companies that aren't negligent. Some will get bigger, some will get smaller. But the end effect is that to succeed, they are going to have to have a certain amount of trust and credibility. You can't say that for the banks... Look at HSBC, who we know for a FACT deals with funds criminals and terrorists. They have been charged with it. However because "we can't let a big bank die" they get away with it. Gox can't. They die, better businesses take their place, and we move on.

True, but you have to admit, 750,000 is alot for the market to bear.

It is! With it being so new, that certainly has an effect on the price.

But this is what can happen with a truly open market. Companies are "open" to operate, and customers can choose to deal with them or no. People chose to deal with these guys, and got fucked.

BTW this is interesting:

Looks like someone might have acquired them?

what's to prevent a company feigning being "good guys" to develop a userbase and then dropping the guise and exploiting it? or conversely, the "good guys" developing a userbase and then being exploited by hackers or the like? It would appear the former happened with Silkroad 2.0 and the latter with Mt. Gox, no?

This "Bombed" my mind!

I think after February 25, bitcoiners will be smarter about where they store their Bitcoins and which exchange they deal with.

mt. gox was probably a yakuza laundering company and they never expected bitcoin or them to get in the limelight and now that it is they're like "oh shit time to shutdown and hide ourselves elsewhere"

That's where trustworthiness and transparency come into play. Not to sound insensitive, but only an idiot would put a lot of money into "Silkroad 2.0" without knowing anything about it. I won't call people who dealt with Gox idiots, but the warnings were there.

The "good guys" build up trustworthiness simply over time, and being open and honest about how they run things. Probably the best company for this in bitcoin right now is Blockchain.info. In fact they are hosting a statement by themselves and others regarding this issue.

My advice is, if you don't trust a company but still want to use their services, don't invest too much into them. Keep your funds in a secure place that you have control over.

If you want to buy some E on silkroad 2.0, go ahead and put $50 worth on there and buy your E. Don't put thousands worth in there, because when it's gone, it's gone. If you want to make a few bucks buying and selling BTC as the price goes up and down, put whatever you are willing to risk on that exchange. Don't leave your entire wallet on there.

This "hack" never would have taken place on any other exchange (in fact, it didn't). It took an epic amount of idiocy to allow it to happen (even their OFFLINE FUNDS WERE STOLEN) and in fact part of me wonders if this was simply an inside job, using maellability as an excuse. I am almost certain that's the case with silkroad (perhaps it's the same people, too)

To me, a cold storage wallet linked to a hot wallet is Retarded to the 10th degree!

For arguments sake, let's assume Mt. Gox was an inside job.

I don't see what's preventing Blockchain.info from performing the same inside job.

Their trustworthiness may make it unlikely they will, but that doesn't preclude the possibility.

I want a mechanism to preclude the possibility or at least reduce the effect on individuals that lose coins, and protect all coins value by extension.

Fiat currency has such mechanisms; FDIC in the U.S. and CDIC in Canada.

Am I missing something?

I'm not trying to arrogantly argue, I WANT coins to work but this issue seriously undermines them.

There's nothing to inherently make Blockchain trustworthy, other than reputation. To me personally, what makes them trustworthy is that they have the same philosophy I do of Bitcoin, and want the currency itself to thrive. This is the opposite of Mark Kapales and whoever ran Silk Road 2. Not that there's anything wrong with just wanting to run a business with bitcoin, but the bigger you get, the more I am going to scrutinize what you do and how you do it.

If they decide to screw people over, they will screw a lot of people, and eventually will be left with something that is pretty much worthless in the end. This is just the nature of crypto currencies, and why it is popular with libertarian mindset and those who want less government control rather than more. Although regulation has its advantages (if the government bailed them out, the people who left money in Gox would probably get some or most or all of it back) it has its drawbacks too (that bailout has to come from everyone else, and also it lets companies continue to run the way they do)

This is part of what makes it a paradigm shifting technology. The end result should be that we don't NEED to have the government step in and bail out and control the currency. What should happen is to be successful, you have to show trustworthiness and transparency. This is still very brand new, and we need to wait and see who those companies are. But unlike those huge old institutions like HSBC, they will be built on trust of their customers, rather than corruption and just being "so big there's not much we can do about it now" when shit goes down.

Finally, you don't have to trust any company to use Bitcoin. You can go down to the ATM or someone on localbitcoins, buy some BTC, and use it without it ever passing through a single exchange or wallet service. The Bitcoin network itself is fine.

I don't think you know how bitcoin works. You can't double spend on the blockchain, they would see it and reverse the transaction.

Gox had a software problem and with Mark Karples at the helm, he fucked even more and it took him 2 years for Gox to admit that they fucked up.

Bitcoin protocal itself has no problems. Blockchain records every transaction.

Get it?

BTW the rumors of the 700K+ being stolen, along with being done over years, and having funds stolen from cold storage, are all based on a document that has yet to be verified as legitimate. They could very well be (and most likely are) bullshit in some way.

Someone did find this though. An address that has had 782,558.7251885 BTC go through it. It's most likely a tumbler though

Blockchain?s Reaction to Mt. Gox | Blockchain.info Team Blog

This is why I started using their service - it's 100% client side, they don't actually keep anything that can be lost

that's some mighty fine detective work S.Pup!