Bitcoin Forum

Sadly the very essence of BTC got hurt with the fall of MtGox. BTC was here so that people would not have to wory about loosing their funds. And here we are with similar crroks (Mark) as in the traditional banking system. And it does not get better when out BTC Jesus favours his friends at MtGox! He admits it in this youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRIJ_jpmwzo

So what are we left with? A volatile currency that is complicated to buy and hard to spend. Yes, every day we have more merchant accepting bitcoin. But why would a newcommer buy BTC so that he can save some money of his purchase at overstock? With all the hassle it does not make sense for him / her.

Yes, BTC will still stand, but sadly more as a speculative asset. And with far less intrinsic value (trust) in the system!

Hope I will be proven wrong becasue I still have 50% of my coins left.

we heard all these same stories with bitcoinica and pirate@40...

bitcoin did not get hurt. only users got hurt.
bitcoin does not have pain sensors or emotions.

the price however has not hurt bitcoin either. low prices are a great investment oppertunity. if users are losing by selling at a loss. then they should not have sold. nothing to do with bitcoin, but with human emotion especially panic.

drama will soon die down the FUD poking at the drama will slowdown as true facts appear. and those users that got hurt will either stop using bitcoin or start buying up some coin to ride the profitable waves to recoup.

in the end life moves on.

and as for the over use of the word intrinsic. that is a dead word from before the 19th century where bank IOU's were backed by gold and that gold has more then one use.

its a word that gold barons and banks love. but is meaningless to real people that know of many things that have value without it being intrinsic.

Its had a net positive affect for users that did not lose money, and the customers may yet get their coin back

a) has brought the Crypto community out in force

b) shows once again the resilience of Crypto's

Bitcoin is dying again. Just another day at the office, folks!  ;D
http://reason.com/blog/2014/02/25/a-normal-day-for-bitcoin-a-currency-that

Yep.  Those of us who see this for what it is, know it was a good thing to balance real life with crypto.  We are educating the investor, which is an awesome thing.

Ah shit run sell everything!!!


Oh wait I did that when we got goxxed the several times before.

The very essence of BTC doesn't include a central trusted third party...

Everything that has happened lately has been for the good in my opinion.
People need to understand what bitcoin is, and what it is not.

From a technical standpoint, I find bitcoin to work as expected.

Its sad that some people seems to have lost their investment, but it has been said over and over, you are responsible for your own coins. You are your own bank whether you like it or not.

This is not another Facebook. Don't expect anyone to hold your hand.

Regarding the current price of btc, I believe it is still somewhat too high, compared to bitcoins current adoption.

Very few "newcommers" got really hurt with mtgox...90% of ppl that got burned were traders that should have known better from summer 2013.

Mt. Gox is/was an exchange and should never have been considered any type of "safe" storage or wallet. I only used Mt. Gox a few times but each time I put USD in as quickly as possible, made my trades, and took my bitcoin out. I never actually went the other direction. But, if I did, I would have put my bitcoin in, sold it, and taken my USD out as quickly as possible.

The problem here is that people got complacent and forgot about security and safe money handling principles. There were warning signs and red flags for months. I got an email from Mt. Gox I think it was around the beginning of December stating that in the next few weeks they were planning on shutting down Mt. Gox for several weeks while they updated their code. The first thing I did was login to make sure that my balances were emptied (by me). This should have been a red flag to everyone. If, after that point, you wanted to continue to trade on Mt. Gox, you should only have done so only with an amount you were prepared to lose.

Would anyone have been so careless with dollar bills? Imagine there was a place you could put your dollars and you could move dollars in and out as you pleased but there was always the possibility this place could close down and you would not have access to any dollars you had in there. Oh wait, these places do exist. We call them banks. And there is always the possibility that one could shut down (and there isn't enough money in FDIC to cover all of us). We need a different kind of currency, one that is immune to such bank runs. Oh wait, we have Bitcoin (and other virtual currencies). Bitcoin was not the problem here, it was the mentality of people trusting Mt. Gox (or any other institution) with their Bitcoin.

I feel bad for everyone who lost money to Mt. Gox, I truly do. But maybe this will underscore the need for protecting OUR OWN assets. People blamed the mortgage companies for giving them loans they couldn't afford. They blamed Bernie Madoff for taking their money without having done any research and having no clue what he was actually doing with it before handing it over. And people blame Mt. Gox for stealing their money even though they ignored all warning signs and left all their money with them. But how many people are taking personal responsibility?

In the end, I think the closing of Mt. Gox will be a very positive thing. Something new WILL come up and take its place. Necessity is the mother of invention and someone WILL come up with a safer, easier wallet for those technically challenged individuals. Others will find ways of educating individuals on how to properly handle this new type of currency. And someone will figure out a better way of bridging the gap between people's everyday currency that they're so used to and this new type of crypto currency. The Mt. Gox fiasco of 2014 takes us two steps back but we will take five steps forward as a result. Perhaps it will be one of those individuals who was fleeced who will take this as his motivation for making it happen and in the end make himself very wealthy as a result.

Keep your funds in your own wallet and voilà you don't lose them, no matter what.

MY COINS have always been safely in my wallet. I am not selling a penny's worth with this low value. HOLD OUT!

true words. but your OS must be clean then. so all in all its a long way to go. we need stuff like trezzor soon.

For now keep your funds in an offline pc and paperwallet done via the offline pc.
Yup, we need trezor, it is very useful.

I totally disagree with the title, actually the very essence of BTC survived: if you have your funds in your wallet you DO NOT lose them, no matter what.

After this Gox debacle, how many BTC of all the BTC in existence have at some point been stolen from its previous owners?

I think 10 - 20% of all bitcoin economy are stolen coins.

Something to think about for all those idealistic people who see bitcoin as ultimate freedom, and the people who downplay the current events as "growing pains". And more of these events may follow.

"We", the bitcoin community, are in some way all money launderers and traders in stolen goods.

Talking about the essence of Bitcoin...

bitcoin didnt still bitcoins.. people did.

dont blame the protocol, blame the human desire for greed

Bitcoin doesn't have an essence, Bitcoin is simple math based code.

Only greedy people that were warned continuously by MtGox's insolvency and incompetent ways got hurt.

Is given a tool that allows them to control their own digital money so they no longer need a bank to make digital payments.

Chooses to store that digital money in an uninsured, unregulated, non-audited bank (MtGox).

Complains that the bank that they chose to use behaved like a bank?

What have we all learned from this debacle? ... If the coins aren't in YOUR own personal wallet (HD, Cold Storage, Paper Wall.. etc) - then you don't actually own them!... If more people actually took ownership of their coins, things like this wouldn't have any room to occur

this.

don't move your coins from your wallet unless you intend on making a transaction within hours. I don't get what is so difficult about this concept.

One of the essences of BTC is that you are in charge of your own financial life.  If you have delegated that to someone - MtGox for example - then you have to be darn sure that they are competent and honest. For nearly 3 years, Gox has had issues and although there have been promises of them fixing them, they didn't.  And yet people kept leaving coins there.

Remember, if you don't have your private keys, your coins are just ledger entries on someone else's books and you don't really own them.

Bitcoin can't really get hurt.

It is the nature of things that when they get hurt, they heal. Wounds heal. Sometimes you lose a finger, or an arm, or a leg, but it heals. Life might be more difficult, but it heals and we go on.

Regarding Bitcoin, the people need to take responsibility for their lives. Bitcoin doesn't only offer a certain amount of freedom from banks and taxes, it also presents the thing that goes along with freedom - responsibility for your life.

If you were left alone, out in the wilderness, to fend for yourself, without any of the modern conveniences, you would be very free. Yet, if you didn't think about where you would get your next cup of water, or your next meal, you might not live very long. The crash of MtGox is starting to show us that we need to take responsibility for our own lives in the freedom that we know as BITCOIN. We can't depend on others to always come through for us.

The BIGGEST danger to all of us from the MtGox crash is, the litigation that will follow. Governments like to look like they are protecting us. They do it so that they can make laws to regulate us. What they really want is to steal from us in the form of taxes, even though they might call these taxes regulation fees - licensing.

But, this is life, right? We are always being hounded by someone or something, from birth to the grave. Youtube search on the words "Memory_of_the_Camps" to see what will happen if we don't stand up and take responsibility for our own lives. It will be the same with Bitcoin. Do you really think that the Bitcoin founders and Satoshi did it all because they loved us?

:)

I would say one thing we should have learned is

- Keeping a big amount of btc on some online centralized service is a bad idea.
- Keeping a small amount of btc on some online centralized service and the rest on a paper backup, is a good idea.

The very essence of bitcoin is peer to peer finance.

Handing over your control of your private keys to a centralized institution goes against the very essence of bitcoin, and defies the whole point of having a blockchain.

Centralized exchanges are the most fragile and non-essential part of the bitcoin ecosystem. They are a necessary evil while bootstrapping the bitcoin economy, but the sooner we stop depending on them, the better.

I can do no but agree.
the problem then lies in where the actual BTC price will be if there were no centralised exchange offering it for trade.
in an ideal world, BTC would have a set fiat/btc price, no fluctuation, no command taken by market whales and no massive wallets holding all our coin.

what we need is a solid p2p exchange, one stop shop, no middleman, no trading fees... just a simple P2P trading platform.
bitcoin is still very young, I think a lot of people have gotten over-exhuberated on the price rises... it should be remembered just how young this thing is and how much more a journey there is to take with bitcoin.

You miss the point of OP.  The bitcoin protocol didn't get hurt, the potential of bitcoin being adopted by the general public got hurt.  Amazed to see so many bitcoiners miss this fundamental point.  If the general public does not adopt bitcoin, it's just a bunch of guys like you and me sitting in a room with their bitcoins looking at each other saying "god, isn't bitcoin great?"  Unless there is mass adoption, bitcoin will eventually wither away.

I hope you are right, but keep in mind that most of us on here on bitcoin fundamentalists.  Doubt the general public would describe bitcoin as "financial freedom"...  with all the news it's more like "a dangerous speculative thing where I could lose all my money... no thanks".   

I agree 100%.  Didn't anybody see the news about how Overstock.com, TigerDirect.com, The D casino hotel, Golden Gate casino hotel, Wordpress, reddit, and hundreds of other merchants have decided to no longer accept bitcoins for payment because of the collapse of MtGox?

Just look at the huge sell off at all the other exchanges.  Since MtGox shut down, there have been so many in the general public that have decided that they no longer want to hold these toxic bitcoins, that the exchange rate has crashed from a high of $400 thirty-seven hours ago (when Gox disappeared) to a low of only $610 a bit more than ten hours ago.

That's a drop of 52.5% in the period of one day after Gox disappeared! (drop? rise? I get those two mixed up, but you see my point, right?)

/sarcasm