OK.
All this breaking/entering & stealing/embezzlement involving Bitcoin has me confused.
1. If the currency has a future, then the thieves are stealing something that has value and will continue to have value. The thieves think that what they have stolen will have future value.
or
2. This is an organized attempt to prevent the development of a currency outside the sovereign control of a nation-state. In which case the hacker-thieves don’t give a rip about the Bitcoins themselves, they merely want to destabilize the system enough to kill public confidence.
I’m leaning #2.
It doesn’t need to have a future value, it only needs to be able to be sold immediately. Thieves don’t stock up for the future, they’re looking for immediate payout. So they hack an exchange, steal some coins from the wallet, sell the coins (great news for the thieves due to the untraceable nature they don’t have to “fence” the coins for the usual 1/10 to 1/3 value, they can just go ahead and sell them at the current market price), now the thieves have the money and let somebody else worry about whether bitcoins will have any value tomorrow. The great news for thieves is there’s a good chance they can just go ahead and steal the coins from the people they sold them to, the whole thing is anonymous and they might even have sold them to the same place the stole them from.
With this kind of fat money on the table and a whole bunch of people involved who clearly don’t understand cyber-security this is the kind of situation hacker thieves dream about. The Mt Gox theft was at the Hans Gruber level, and nobody even needed a plan that included faking their own deaths.
Put me down in the #2 camp....
or
3. The processes at Mt. Gox had a flaw, leading to instability in the books which was exploited. The young CEO got in over her head starting with something interesting and manageable, but then scaled out of her control (both in price and press); when it broke to the tune of a half-billion dollars, she (being inexperienced in life) decided to hit the off switch just to make the stress go away.
I’m all for siding with Occam’s Razor: the simplest explanation is probably right.
There’s a reason executives of large companies are paid a great deal: ability to manage risk and stress.
Your #2 is erroneous because it is private bankers who (in the US it is the euphemistically named Federal Reserve) actually hold the purse strings and they are not bound by any nation state in the final analysis else the Bush family would be in prison from their grandfather aiding the Nazis in the 1930s.