14 DAY TRIAL // The website of Mt. Gox is back online, but not as many were hoping for. Instead, a day after the site became inaccessible, the company is explaining that it is closing all transactions for the time being.
However, the site explains that, considering the recent news reports and the potential repercussions on the Bitcoin exchange’s operations and the market in its entirety, transactions have been stopped.
Despite promising that it will closely monitor the situation and that it will react accordingly, there’s been no other statement from Mt. Gox thus far, or its CEO, Mark Karpeles.
The message, of course, makes a direct reference to the rumors regarding Mt. Gox’s insolvency that left the entire Bitcoin world in a state of complete confusion.
The issues with Mt. Gox started earlier this month when the company discovered some technical problems that threatened the integrity of the system. This pushed Mt. Gox to halt withdrawals until everything was fixed. The issue was not resolved in the following couple of weeks, making people protest in front of the company’s headquarters.
Mt. Gox then said there had also been a security breach and halted all operations for a brief period, before resuming work.
However, in the past couple of days, things went south. Mt. Gox’s CEO, Mark Karpeles, resigned from the Bitcoin Foundation and the site became inaccessible. Soon after, a document hinting to the market’s imminent bankruptcy hit the media, although its source wasn’t verified completely. The same file showed that an attack on the company caused the loss of over 744,000 Bitcoins, worth about $350 million at Monday’s trading value.
Other Bitcoin companies immediately tried to set some distance between themselves and Mt. Gox, claiming that the “tragic violation of the trust of users of Mt. Gox was the result of one company’s actions,” which, of course, does not reflect the resilience or value of Bitcoin as a whole.
Initially entitled “Joint Statement Regarding the Insolvency of Mt. Gox,” the statement was later renamed to exclude the hints towards the company’s financial issues.
On top of everything, the Wall Street Journal reports that Mt. Gox was sent a subpoena from a United States federal prosecutor, dealing another blow to the marketplace. The world’s largest Bitcoin exchange apparently received the subpoena earlier this month, which asked the service to preserve certain documents.
With the Bitcoin world in relative chaos, Bitcoin prices have dropped again.
