The price had been remarkably stable during the prior month, despite all the chaos Bitcoin threw into the market. The dust hasn't completely settled, but the media response has been mostly on point... less FUD than I expected.
Population and adoption is likely what's allowed the BTC market to absorb a lot of the bad news lately. It may still be in its infant-stages of growth, but since the technology underneath has practical implications it has obvious staying-power.
Along the lines of what @alindsey3 asked regarding the headwinds to adoption Bitcoin faces, what is your take on what Bitcoin's proper place alongside Fiat, @cardinsider?
As far as I'm concerned bitcoin behaves and trades like a commodity and a speculative one at that. Until we have a closed loop currency system, I don't believe fiat will be at risk from bitcoin usage.
I think there's a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation out there about what exactly went wrong at MT Gox. @kytsune and @cardinsider, if you want to chime in here with your understanding, it'd be good to clear it up for those who don't understand.
Part of it involves the cited figure of roughly 750k BTC missing, which is thought to have become missing due to MtGox's poor implantation of their BTC wallet software (which Karpeles blamed on the Bitcoin protocol.)
Mark Rizzn Hopkins One of the misconceptions going around is that it was a heist similar to what we've seen in the past. The understanding I've come to from devs I've spoken with who are familiar with the matter is that it was more of a "leaky bucket" issue.
The other part revolves around the insolvency issues pertaining to the freeze on withdrawals and the current shutdown status of gox. Its being speculated that the theft may have occurred years ago and gox moved to a fractional reserve system
Mark Rizzn Hopkins Almost every major collapse in price in Bitcoin history (except for the China correction) was the result of a technical fail from MT Gox.
To me, MtGox has had seemingly more downs than ups and it maintained its status as exchange-of-note for too long due to sheer momentum. At some point something's got to give, either it fixes itself or it goes away. A broken Gox is worse than dead.
Its significant to the bitcoin community in a way that the fall of gox is clearing the way for a more mature infrastructure to take its place with new service providers. Gox was rife with instability and poor user experience, and clearly had accoustability
kytsune I agree. Having something giant like Gox -- which was in the way -- fall down so that smaller, smarter exchanges can grow would definitely seem to have a healthy impact on any ecosystem.
It most likely will be a good thing, once we get past the general naysaying of Bitcoin that inevitably pops up after something like this. I saw "Tulip Bulbs" more than once.
People fear things they don't understand, and more so, they can't quite grasp the idea of an intangible having monetary value. If BTC had a tangible representation, might that work to change things?
Mark Rizzn Hopkins Perhaps. That line of thinking puzzles me in this day and age of debit cards and online banking. We've been frantically pushing towards digital banking with a protocol that is ill equipped to handle those challenges.
Art Lindsey III@rizzn Agreed, but even with digital banking, people still picture cash in their minds. They can relate to it. They have no point of reference for BTC. And I'm sure that unsettles some people. It's purely psychological.
Thanks to everyone who joined us this week for the Bi-Weekly Bitcoin Crowdchat. We delayed a week last week, so we'll be playing catch up and coming back next week with another. Jesse Stay will be re-joining us, along with other special guests.
Later everyone. We'll look forward to whatever MtGox news rolls out and stay tuned to SiliconANGLE.com for more coverage.
SiliconANGLE | Computer Science meets Social Science The real headliner this week is “What happened to MtGox?” And not to disappoint readers of the Bitcoin Weekly there is a summary of this week’s news as it pertains to the situation happening with MtGox. For those readers...»
For the first time in the history of the world you have cash with an API interface that any developer in the world can start developing on without permission from their central banker. So you are going to unleash creativity.
Absolutely. The way cryptocurrency protocols work, it allows people to vote with their amassed value to affect social change, as opposed to paying a tax or signing a petition.
There is a decent chance that bitcoin ends up being a widely-used, alternative payment mechanism, in the same way the Discover card or PayPal are widely-used payment mechanisms.
Once of the hallmarks of the Bitcoin protocol is how easy it can be used to implement inside of software as a payment model. In fact, BitPay working on a JS solution for payments really shows its capabilities.
Since Sunday, the MtGox situation turned from a low rumble to an outright avalanche. The joint-statement by the Bitcoin Six really led the news in expecting that MtGox is flummoxed; however, the leaked document means it might come back in another form.
