Posted on 02/28/2014 9:21:04 AM PST by xzins
The Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange in Tokyo filed for bankruptcy protection Friday and its chief executive said 850,000 bitcoins, worth several hundred million dollars, are unaccounted for.
The exchange's CEO Mark Karpeles appeared before Japanese TV news cameras, bowing deeply. He said a weakness in the exchange's systems was behind a massive loss of the virtual currency involving 750,000 bitcoins from users and 100,000 of the company's own bitcoins. That would amount to about $425 million at recent prices.
The online exchange's unplugging earlier this week and accusations it had suffered a catastrophic theft have drawn renewed regulatory attention to a currency created in 2009 as a way to make transactions across borders without third parties such as banks.
It remains unclear if the missing bitcoins were stolen, voided by technological flaws or both.
"I am sorry for the troubles I have caused all the people," Karpeles, a Frenchman, said in Japanese at a Tokyo court.
Karpeles had not made a public appearance since rumors of the exchange's insolvency surfaced last month. He said in a web post Wednesday that he was working to resolve Mt. Gox's problems.
The loss is a giant setback to the currency's image because its boosters have promoted bitcoin's cryptography as protecting it from counterfeiting and theft.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
Apparently not as secure as all the hype tried to make out...
So, how stole it? The Fed?
No big deal. It is very obvious that the Obamacare people developed the system. Give them time and they will fix it completely (NOT!!!)
Unfortunately, unlike the Fed, they can’t just print more bitcoin to cover it up.
There is a well known bug in the Bitcoin protocol which enables the same coin to be transferred more than once. Every exchange knows about it and they all defend against it. Except evidently Mt. Gox did not. It’s an absolutely stunning failure. It’s a bit like a bank manager not bothering to lock the vault at night.
Great, now a Frenchman has surrendered to the Japanese.
“Mooooshi waki gozaiimasen deshiter”
People, I fear, are looking at this stuff as some ordinary investment, but as a different kind of money. In which case what happened at Mt. Gox is viewed as a bank getting robbed, rather than the Madoff-esque scheme it looks like.
What is pitiful is that people still consider this more worthy of investment than traditional currencies. I’m not hearing of runs on Mt. Gox, at least not yet.
To be fair, this kind of misplaced trust is why libertarian ideas of government failed long ago. Who’s going to sue Mt. Gox and where? You can’t. So regulators are going to step in, and even the GOP will be copacetic with that.
Each such failure like this is also an interesting study in human folly.
A few hundred of them leaked out of my computer last month. Now I know where they came from. Darn things are hard to clean up.
This lady is also a writer at Salon.com. Maybe I can get few in Kabukicho with her and see what’s up.
Anybody that thought this was a good idea is going to be in for a rude awakening.
I could never figure out what exactly a bit coin was supposed to be other than a way for somebody to get rich quick. It turns out that instead this is a road for many to get poor quick.
There are some Freepers who are going to lose their shirts over this scheme. A lot of Freepers were excited about this as an alternative to the shrinking dollar. It doesn’t look like this motherload is going to pan out. It looks more like a pot of turds at the end of this rainbow.
I actually have a friend from France who is the best chef I’ve ever had the pleasure to eat a meal with, and he speaks Japanese just like that. Thank God he can make brilliant beef brisket and loves to drink chartreuse with us.
Many of the bit coins are still there, but they will be taken by the “creditors” and lawyers. The investors will get stiffed.
“There is a well known bug in the Bitcoin protocol which enables the same coin to be transferred more than once”
Gosh, don’t you just hate it when your money catches a protocol bug?
“I could never figure out what exactly a bit coin was supposed to be other than a way for somebody to get rich quick. It turns out that instead this is a road for many to get poor quick.”
But ALL get rich schemes involve a few getting rich quick at the expense of a great many more getting poor quick.
I worked hard to get my Japanese to become accentless and the “gaijin Japanese” really cracks me up, especially if they know a great deal of Japanese.
Most European Japanese speakers can’t seem to lose their accent.
Best eternal investment: Jesus Christ (only eternal investment)
Best earthly investment: My ideas do not include bitcoin, equities, bonds, CDs, or PAPER of any kind.
bitcoin is just one crypto-currency. There are plenty of others out there as well. Crypto currency is in its infancy and you better believe many governments do not like it at all. Those who are “investing” in crypto will be in for some shocks, some ups and some downs. The technology overall however can have a significant impact against government eroding our rights.
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