True Believers Cheer the Fall of Bitcoin Exchange Mt. Gox

It turns out that if you’re hoping to run a worldwide revolution in finance, it’s best not to put too much faith in a company initially intended as a way to buy and sell Magic: The Gathering playing cards. Sure enough, Mt. Gox, the Japanese company that was once the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange, seems to have met its demise on Monday night after losing hundreds of millions of dollars of its customers’ Bitcoins. After being valued at more than $1,000 late last year, Bitcoins are trading around $500.

It has been clear for a while that something is seriously wrong with Mt. Gox, which spent most of last year having its accounts seized by government regulators and experiencing increasing trouble allowing its customers to get at their money. Earlier this month the site restricted withdrawals, citing technical problems. On Sunday the company’s chief executive resigned from the board of the Bitcoin Foundation, the primary advocacy group for Bitcoin. Then on Monday, Ryan Galt, a Bitcoin blogger, posted a document purporting to outline a crisis strategy from Mt. Gox. In the document, the company copped to having lost track of 744,000 Bitcoins, which seemed to have been stolen over the course of several weeks as the exchange struggled with security issues. Mt. Gox soon took down its site and erased its Twitter feed.