Mt. Gox is offline.

[randomness]

Remember Mt. Gox?

Wait, what do you mean "remember"?

Seems they've gone offline.

From a CNET story:

Embattled Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox has largely vanished from the Internet amid accusations that the exchange is insolvent after a years-long theft that resulted in the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Web site for the Tokyo-based exchange has been wiped clean, as has its official Twitter feed. A screen shot posted by a Reddit user indicates that trading on the exchange has been halted.


The exchange's apparent shutdown was linked to an alleged hacking that went unnoticed for years, according to a purported internal Mt. Gox document circulating on the Internet. Labeled "Crisis strategy draft," the document reports that the exchange suffered a loss of 744,000 Bitcoins, about $350 million at Monday's trading, and outlines a scheme for restoring confidence in the exchange.

Comments

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

There's a bitcoin meetup in a cafe in Holyoke MA now. That about blew my mind-- we're a city of 40K people, in a valley with a share of geeks, but I still wouldn't have expected a bitcoin meetup in our town. (It's at the best coffee shop, too, which is how I stumbled upon it.)

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

It's pretty simple: The final stage of an asset bubble is when the experienced insiders realize that the only hope of escaping with the current paper value of their stuff is to sell it to the greatest fool, the inexperienced outsider who piles into a market bubble at the end. "The Rockefellers have sold Rockefeller Center three times in the last century, and each time have bought it back at a lower price." The Bitcoin ATM is all the evidence you need that you don't want to own the things.

[drwex]

Yes, this, exactly.