MtGox, the once largest Bitcoin exchange site lost hundreds thousands of Bitcoins. How is that even possible? Noone believe that such thing can happen without even notice it. Ok, someone claimed he did get his Bitcoins, support checks it and send more, a second one claims the same, be suspicious and investigate it. After you lost 100 Bitcoins, 1000, 10000 it is noticeable, I don’t believe they had to loose more than 700.000 Bitcoins to realize that something is wrong with their system. This must be an inside job, at least 1-2 people were aware of this and they did nothing, or even worse exploited the issue for their own benefit. Many customers of MtGox are very angry and I am afraid that we will see paybacks after the official announcement of their lost money.
Let’s assume that everything went wrong and MtGox realized that and they stop Bitcoin withdraws. Why they didn’t stop also deposit options and they let people put their money into their exchange? And after taking more money they decided to stop everything and now people can’t get even their recently deposited money out. Even if they lost the enormous amount of Bitcoins they have no excuse not to refund customers that deposited money and made transactions after the Bitcoin withdraw freeze.
We will wait to see what it will happen as the exchange site filed for a bankruptcy protection. Bitcoin will survive this also as it is a lot bigger than this but people now don’t trust exchange websites as much as they don’t trust banks. In my opinion, exchange websites that store Bitcoins and have access to our wallets are like banks and it is very easy to freeze your account or loose your money. If you want to buy Bitcoins, buy them and move them to your PC wallet and backup your private keys with password protection.