No One Is Mourning the Death of Bitcoin Giant Mt. Gox

From Foreign Policy Thu Apr 17 2014, 23:40:42

Since peaking at more than $1,100 in late November, Bitcoin's trading value has fallen by half. On Wednesday, a Japanese court delivered a death blow to Mt. Gox, once the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, which had collapsed after hackers stole a huge trove of the cryptocurrency from the company's servers. By denying the exchange's application to rebuild under bankruptcy protection, the court sent the exchange hurtling toward liquidation.

But for the Bitcoin faithful, the death knell for Mt. Gox isn't the end of Bitcoin -- it's just the end of amateur hour. "Mt. Gox was like a slow motion implosion," said Jerry Brito, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Mt. Gox had struggled with funding, in the run-up to its shuttering, and many were skeptical about the reliability of its software. "Anyone who was paying attention knew months in advance that the end was around the corner."

The currency's survival since Mt. Gox's demise serves as a testament to the rapidly growing cryptocurrency industry. "If this had happened to Gox two years ago, it would have been a much bigger setback," says Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist for ConvergEx, a brokerage firm in New York. While Mt. Gox is an embarrassing milestone for the currency, a sufficient number of other exchanges, such as Coinbase and CoinX, have emerged to preserve its future.

In fact, since news broke in February that Mt. Gox had been hacked and robbed of some $500 million in Bitcoin, the currency's profile and availability has only continued to grow. Bitcoin ATMs are popping up in Australia, the [view whole blog post ]

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