The very essence of BTC got hurt

[raskul]

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.

[cr1776]

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.

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.

[Lauda]

Bitcoin can't really get hurt.

[BADecker]

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?

[corebob]

What have we all learned from this debacle? ...

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.

[Timo Y]

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.

[raskul]

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.

[dynodog]

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.

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.

[dynodog]

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.

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.

Nah. There are enough people who have tasted financial freedom to keep this thing going for a long time. The genie is out of the bottle and no amount of goxxing is going to put it back.

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".   

[DannyHamilton]

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.

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 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