Maybe they (bitpay) even had some losses; but it's their problem to figure out at what price they can sell the coins and which exchanges to use; I'm pretty sure they don't just rely on gox
So whatever we discuss here, large businesses like bitpay will figure out a fallback options, don't worry. You make it sound as if when gox goes down bitcoin economy stops - it does not, that's all I wanted to point out
Oh, sorry, that's not what I intended to convey, but I can see how you got that impression. And I should have considered that all/most merchants are insulated from exchange rates to a large extent by using bitpay (or similar - not sure how many options there are here). I'm not worried, but I do think that Gox in its current state is a point of weakness. It has liquidity, but can't handle volume. That will hopefully be changing soon though. It's also unfortunate that a DDOS attack can be used to manipulate price (though in this case it may not have been entirely bad since we probably needed something to stem the madness, even if briefly). It would be better to have many exchanges with deep liquidity and capacity for volume though, and again I see this as something that will come with time. A stronger exchange network is IMO one of the prerequisites for BTC to grow into a major worldwide medium of commerce, and one that (based merely on my sporadic reading around the forum) doesn't get discussed enough. But this will have to come along with BTC growth, and there will be bumps along the way. But fundamentally I'm very bullish on BTC and the economy it is enabling, and there's no way a little glitch like this can shake that.