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Mt. Gox Gone? Apparent Theft Shakes Bitcoin World
mendax was one of many readers to write with news about the apparent shutdown of Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, in the wake of massive theft. "The New York Times is reporting that Mt. Gox, the most prominent Bitcoin exchange, 'appeared to be on the verge of collapse late Monday, raising questions about the future of a volatile marketplace.' 'On Monday night, a number of leading Bitcoin companies jointly announced that Mt. Gox, the largest exchange for most of Bitcoin's existence, was planning to file for bankruptcy after months of technological problems and what appeared to have been a major theft. A document circulating widely in the Bitcoin world said the company had lost 744,000 Bitcoins in a theft that had gone unnoticed for years. That would be about 6 percent of the 12.4 million Bitcoins in circulation.' Maybe the U.S. Dollar isn't so bad after all." Forbes goes further, and says flatly that Mt. Gox has shut down; Wired calls it an implosion. Reader electron gunner links to the alleged leaked document which outlines the exchange's crisis strategy. Watch this story for updates, since there are bound to be new developments.
Waiting for the libertarians here to demonstrate why this shows how Bitcoin is such a wonderful idea.
Oh, that's right. Unregulated currency free from government interference. Enjoy!
A programmer who would implement an ssh server in PHP may be part of the problem?
BTW, the article linked from that reddit comments thread really is beautiful. In the absence of the later disasters, I might have speculated that this was parody.
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If it's risky as an investment, how useful is it as a currency? I would expect a currency to be one of the least risky forms of property to be useful.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
For small-scale transactions in time and value - e.g. turning $7 into BTC to immediately buy a CD - a relatively unstable currency is fine.
Stability of currency is absolutely needed for a vendor. If you had to change your pricing every 10 minutes how would you ever advertise anything? Would restaurants have dynamic menus with pricing that changes throughout the meal?
Would you similarly suggest that diamonds are worthless if your neighborhood jeweler got robbed?
Funny thing, those diamonds. You go and buy a $10,000 diamond from a jeweler and together with the diamond you get an official certificate stating that the diamond was worth $10,000 on a particular date. The same day you take the diamond to another jeweler, and they agree that, yes, it's worth $10,000, and then offer you $6000 if you want to sell it.
Diamonds are nice status symbols allowing you to say 'look, I can afford to pay $10,000 for a sparkling rock' but they are worthless as investments as even when there is a consensus about their value, no one who is professional in the diamond trade will pay you anything close to that. If you want to get your money back, you need to find some sucker who doesn't know this and sell it to them.
Anarchist societies fail for the same reason communist societies fail: Humans are greedy assholes who'd gladly kill you for a buck if they think they can get away with it.
It's also the reason why the capitalist system works out.
Still, I think it's sad that we base our financial and economical system on the bad traits of humanity. Actually, I'm sad that it works.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.