Mt. Gox, once a leader in bitcoin exchange handling as much as eighty percent of the world’s bitcoin trades, filed for bankruptcy in Tokyo District Court last week leaving many concerned over the future of the digital currency, reports the Washington Post, Reuters, Information Week, and others.
Bitcoin is a digital currency and monetary transfer technology that removes banks and credit card companies from online financial exchanges by using cryptography to manage the creation and transfer of money. The collapse of Mt. Gox, which revealed that approximately $500 million in bitcoins had been stolen, has triggered an investigation led by Japanese authorities, according to Information Week.
Importantly, too, that report reveals, Mt. Gox is still unclear as to what techniques were used by the attackers, when the attack occurred, or, truly, how much was taken. Information Week offers one possible explanation, namely “that hackers employed transaction malleability attacks.”
But regardless of the “who?”, “when?”, or “how much?” of the debacle, as the Washington Post reports,
The spectacular rise and fall of the marketplace, called Mt. Gox, has played out as something of a morality tale for those skeptical that a currency created on computers and untethered from regulatory structures or the full faith and credit of an issuing nation can be made secure enough for routine transactions.
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