14 DAY TRIAL // Mt. Gox has been having so many troubles in the past few weeks and this latest one seems to be the worst. The site of the Bitcoin exchange service is officially down, while the entire Twitter account was emptied of messages yesterday.
Although withdrawals have been halted for two weeks, a screenshot posted on Reddit indicates that the entire trading system had been disabled before the site went dark.
The fact that the site has stopped working can only make everyone trust the rumors that Mt. Gox was actually the victim of hacking. According to an internal Mt. Gox document that circulated on the Internet, titled “Crisis strategy draft,” the exchange suffered a loss of 744,000 Bitcoins.
Taking into account the Monday trading price, the stolen Bitcoins would have been worth about $350 million. The file didn’t come directly from Mt. Gox, but Ryan Galt, a Bitcoin blogger that brought it to attention, said that his source was reliable.
On top of it all, a group of Bitcoin organizations issued a statement on Monday in which they talked about the “insolvency” of Mt. Gox, the largest exchange for the crypto currency.
This statement took many by surprise, especially since it originally seemed to only be a temporary problem affecting the platform and that the company was trying to work it out.
“This tragic violation of the trust of users of Mt.Gox was the result of one company's actions and does not reflect the resilience or value of Bitcoin and the digital currency industry,” reads a statement issued by the co-founder of Coinbase, the execs of Kraken, Bitstamp.net, BTC China, Blockchain.info and Circle. They are all trying to make an effort to protect the cryptocurrency in its entirety despite what’s happening with Mt. Gox.
This past weekend, it was announced that Mt. Gox’s CEO decided to resign from the Bitcoin Foundation, a decision that, combined with the halted trading and insolvency rumors, took the company by surprise.
“We are shocked to learn about Mt. Gox’s alleged insolvency. While we are unable to comment on whether or not Mt. Gox’s business operations employed operational best practices and reasonable accounting procedures, we can assure the public that the Bitcoin protocol is functioning properly,” the Foundation said.
Whether Mt. Gox has officially died or not, it remains to be seen what’s going to happen in the Bitcoin world in the coming weeks.