It’s the end of non-governmental regulated crypto-currency.
What I don’t get is how did it happen? Bitcoin was designed to be stored personally, and record keeping was peer to peer proliferating throughout the world as a record in everybodies wallet. Why were people keeping them stored at Mt. Gox?
“It’s the end of non-governmental regulated crypto-currency.”
To some extent, there never was a non-regulated cryptocurrency. However, Bitcoin by design is independent of any particular government. The US may attempt to regulate it, but it will be very similar to trying to regulate barter. I suppose they could legislate that US businesses not accept it, but I seriously doubt that will happen. Even if it did, non-US businesses could still accept it.
Russia has already outlawed it...we’ll see how eager US lawmakers are to emulate Russia. ;-)
“What I don’t get is how did it happen? Bitcoin was designed to be stored personally, and record keeping was peer to peer proliferating throughout the world as a record in everybodies wallet. Why were people keeping them stored at Mt. Gox?”
My understanding is that there is a chain of transactions of all whole and fractional bitcoins in order to keep a given bitcoin from being owned or spent more than once, and IF you had the computer resources to keep up with this ever expanding chain, you COULD store your own bitcoins on your own computer. But as the chain expands infinitely, so does the computing power to keep your own personal copy of the chain up to date, and so it becomes impractical for more than just a few systems to do that. So, almost everyone elects to “keep” their bitcoins at a site that can keep up with the transaction chain. (This is just my understanding of the situation; I’m not a bitcoin expert. Any money that requires a PhD in computer science to understand is not the kind of money I’d want to own: I only have a Masters Degree in computer science, so am not qualified to own any bitcoins anyway.)