You’ve probably heard of the Mt. Gox website shutdown last Monday night. In case you haven’t, we’ll go over what happened to the bitcoin exchange site in this article. We’ve also included a statement from Ryan Straus who is an expert on virtual currencies.

Mt. Gox’ website shut down

Last Monday, February 23, 2014, virtual currency exchange site Mt. Gox closed its website. This came after a series of deleted Twitter posts. The next night, news of how the company lost 750,000 bitcoins over the past three years surfaced thanks to a rumored internal document. As of April 2013, Mt. Gox handled 70% of worldwide bitcoin trades.

For those new to bitcoin, this digital currency was introduced in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoins are created and traded using cryptography making it impossible to counterfeit or hack. It gained popularity as a payment method with various companies thanks to its inherent security. This lead to bitcoin exchanges that help facilitate bitcoin trading.

Long term fix for bitcoin

Around $350 million was lost due to the bitcoin theft leaving bitcoin investors in shock. The credibility of bitcoin exchanges are also being questioned as others push for legislation of the currency. An article by Ryan Straus on the PlayerAuctions HUB points out that the fault may not lie with just the exchanges. The prominent lawyer and virtual currency expert writes: “the real bitcoin story concerns the injection of the question of trust into a protocol that was designed to function without it.”