Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox goes dark in blow to virtual currency
By Ruairidh Villar, Sophie Knight and Brett Wolf
TOKYO/ST LOUIS Tue Feb 25, 2014 9:22pm EST
Mock Bitcoins are displayed on a table in an illustration picture taken in Berlin in this January 7, 2014 file photo. Mt. Gox, once the world's biggest bitcoin exchange, looked to have essentially disappeared on February 25, 2014, with its website down, its founder unaccounted for and a Tokyo office empty bar a handful of protesters saying they had lost money investing in the virtual currency.
Credit: Reuters/Pawel Kopczynski/File
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TOKYO/ST LOUIS (Reuters) - Mt. Gox, once the world's biggest bitcoin exchange, abruptly stopped trading on Tuesday and its chief executive said the business was at "a turning point," sparking concerns about the future of the unregulated virtual currency.
Several other digital currency exchanges and prominent early-stage investors in bitcoin responded with forceful statements in an attempt to reassure investors of both bitcoin's viability and their own security protocols.
The website of Mt. Gox suddenly went dark on Tuesday with no explanation, and the company's Tokyo office was empty - the only activity was outside, where a handful of protesters said they had lost money investing in the virtual currency.
Hours later, Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles told Reuters in an email: "We should have an official announcement ready soon-ish. We are currently at a turning point for the business. I can't tell much more for now as this also involves other parties." He did not elaborate on the details or give his location.
Bitcoin has gained increasing acceptance as a method of payment and has attracted a number of large venture capital investors.
At a current price of about $517, the total bitcoins in circulation are worth approximately $6.4 billion.
Investors deposit their bitcoins in digital wallets at specific exchanges, so the Mt. Gox shutdown is similar to a bank closing its doors - people cannot retrieve their funds.
A document circulating on the Internet purporting to be a crisis plan for Mt. Gox, said more than
744,000 bitcoins were "missing due to malleability-related theft", and noted Mt. Gox had $174 million in liabilities against $32.75 million in assets. It was not possible to verify the document or the exchange's financial situation.
If accurate, that would mean approximately
6 percent of the 12.4 million bitcoins minted would be considered missing.
A statement on Bitcoin's website said, "In the event of recent news reports and the potential repercussions on MtGox's operations and the market, a decision was taken to close all transactions for the time being in order to protect the site and our users. We will be closely monitoring the situation and will react accordingly."
The digital currency has caught the eye of regulators concerned with consumer protections and bitcoin's use in money laundering.
Benjamin M. Lawsky, Superintendent of Financial Services for the State of New York, said in a statement, that while all of the facts surrounding Mt. Gox are "not yet clear, these developments underscore that smart, tailored regulation could play an important role in protecting consumers and the security of the money that they entrust to virtual currency firms."
Lawsky said last month that he planned to issue rules for businesses handling virtual currencies.
SECURITY QUESTIONS
Mt. Gox halted withdrawals earlier this month after it said it detected "unusual activity on its bitcoin wallets and performed investigations during the past weeks." The move pushed bitcoin prices down to their lowest level in nearly two months.
Even with the halt on February 7, Mt. Gox still handled more transactions than any other in the past month. Over the last 30 days, Mt. Gox has handled more than one million bitcoin transactions denominated in dollars, or about 34 percent of activity, according to Bitcoincharts, which provides data and charts for the bitcoin network.
Critics of the exchange, from rivals to burned investors, said the digital marketplace operator had long been lax over its security. Investors in bitcoin, who have endured a volatile ride in the value of the
unregulated cyber-tender, said they still had faith in the currency despite the problems at Mt. Gox.
"Mt. Gox is one of several exchanges, and their exit, while unfortunate, opens a door of opportunity," The Bitcoin Foundation, the digital currency's trade group, said in a statement. "This incident demonstrates the need for responsible individuals and members of the bitcoin community to lead in providing reliable services."
United Kingdom-based Bitstamp, the second-largest bitcoin exchange by volume, said on its website that it had done an audit of its systems and that it was not subject to the same kind of "malleability" that "was apparently exploited at Mt. Gox." Similarly, BTC-E, another exchange, assured investors that it has "no vulnerabilities during client transactions."
"VERY ANGRY"
Bitcoin has been a roller-coaster of late, rising and falling dramatically, sometimes on an intraday basis, and its price varies greatly depending on the exchange. The program that runs the currency has been the target of hackers disrupting transactions recently.
The Mt. Gox bitcoin, which traded at $828.99 before February 7, when the exchange halted withdrawals, since plunged 83.7 percent to $135.
At Bitstamp, the price hit a low of $400 on Tuesday, down 40 percent since February 7. It had recovered lately to $517.
Bitstamp has had more than 800,000 U.S. dollar transactions in the last 30 days, according to Bitcoincharts. In the last two days, Bitstamp has handled more volume than Mt. Gox.
Mt. Gox was a founding member and one of the three elected industry representatives on the board of the Bitcoin Foundation. A bitcoin exchange since 2010, Mt. Gox is a relatively old player, having grown quickly when there were few alternatives.
On Sunday Karpeles resigned from the Foundation's board.
"I'm very angry," said Kolin Burges, a self-styled "
crypto-currency trader" and former software engineer who came from London for answers after Mt. Gox did not tell him what happened to his bitcoins, which at one point were worth
$300,000.
Six leading bitcoin exchanges - which allow users to trade bitcoins for U.S. dollars and other currencies - distanced themselves from Mt. Gox.
"This tragic violation of the trust of users of Mt. Gox was the result of one company's actions and does not reflect the resilience or value of bitcoin and the digital currency industry," the companies - Coinbase, Kraken, Bitstamp, BTC China, Blockchain and Circle - said in the statement. "As with any new industry, there are certain bad actors that need to be weeded out, and that is what we're seeing today."
Venture capitalists, many of whom have invested in bitcoin and related services, jumped to bitcoin's defense.
Fred Wilson, a partner at Union Square Ventures and a backer of Coinbase, which allows consumers to easily buy and sell bitcoins with wallets directly connected to their bank accounts, wrote in a blog post that part of the maturation of a sector "will inevitably be failures, crashes, and other messes."
"The wonderful thing about a globally distributed financial network is that if one of the nodes goes down, it doesn't take the system down," he wrote, adding that he had bought some bitcoin on Tuesday.
"I always feel good buying when there is blood in the streets in any market."
Marc Andreessen, whose venture capital firm has invested millions in bitcoin ventures, told CNBC that other exchanges are doing fine.
In Boston, Kyle Powers and Chris Yim, co-founders of Liberty Teller, a company that operates a bitcoin automated teller machine, answered customers' questions at their kiosk in South Station Tuesday. Yim said he expects a price dip in bitcoin, but no long-term problems with the currency.
TEETHING PROBLEMS
Virtual currency exchanges "stand to benefit from the Mt. Gox fallout," but there will be "increased expectations on the transparency and disclosures they need to make to customers," said Jaron Lukasiewicz, co-founder and chief executive of Coinsetter, a New York-based bitcoin exchange.
Steve Hudak, spokesman for Treasury's anti-money laundering unit, the
Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), said it is "aware of the reports regarding Mt. Gox" but had no additional comment. To date it is the only U.S. regulatory agency to have any oversight of Mt. Gox.
Democratic Senator Tom Carper of Delaware, who chairs the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said in a statement that Mt. Gox "is a reminder of the damage potentially ill equipped and unregulated financial actors can wreak on unsuspecting consumers. U.S. policymakers and regulators can and should learn from this incident to protect consumers."
Karpeles himself, while insisting on his own exchange's reliability, has made no secret that bitcoin is, as he told Reuters last April, a "high-risk investment."
"If you buy bitcoins, you should buy keeping in mind that the value could be zero the day after."
The concierge at his home - an upscale apartment in the Shibuya district - said he was not answering his intercom. His mailbox was so stuffed with mail that the flap would not close.
(Reporting by Ruairidh Villar and Sophie Knight in Tokyo, and Brett Wolf of the Compliance Complete service of Thomson Reuters Accelus in St. Louis; Additional reporting by Cheng Herng Shinn, Stanley White and Noriyuki Hirata in Tokyo, Dominic Reuter in Boston, Sarah McBride in San Francisco, Karen Freifeld in New York, and Chris Peters in Bangalore; Writing by William Mallard and David Gaffen; Editing by Ian Geoghegan and Tiffany Wu)
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With its extraordinary $19 billion swoop on WhatsApp last week, Facebook proved its stock is not so different from the crypto-currency of the moment, bitcoin. They can both be used for certain, specific purposes. Neither is backed by a government. Both depend on vast networks of individuals. And their worth reflects demand, which is based on murky fundamentals. The trick: monetize them while they still have value.
Unlike U.S. dollars, neither Facebook shares nor bitcoins are an official form of legal tender. But some people are willing to accept them as payment. A prominent example is WhatsApp’s founders and financial backers, who happily exchanged their stakes in the text-messaging startup for Facebook stock worth $15 billion. Yet Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s boss, would have struggled to purchase a coffee with his shares at the German bakery where he and WhatsApp Chief Executive Jan Koum appear to have hatched the deal.
Similarly, bitcoin enjoys no universal acceptance. True, at Bandana’s Bar-B-Q in Coralville, Iowa the currency will buy a slab of ribs. But it will not get a Big Mac at any of McDonald’s 14,000 U.S. outlets. Bitcoin is not money as most people understand it. There is no Department of the Treasury controlling its issuance or value. It is backed only by mathematics, and its total stock is limited at 21 million virtual coins.
In that sense, bitcoin is only as useful as the network of people and businesses that are willing to accept it in exchange for goods and services. It goes without saying that a similar “network effect” underpins Facebook’s entire existence.
There is one big difference. Unlike bitcoin, Facebook’s share count can expand. Last week, it issued 182 million new shares and 46 million restricted stock units to WhatsApp’s owners, adding some 9 percent to the total of shares outstanding. Such share-printing could undermine the share’s value, just as governments debase their currencies by printing too much money. Of course, Facebook does something – it’s not merely a putative store of value like bitcoin. So it can grow into its larger equity base.
The risk for Facebook and bitcoin, respectively, is that someone creates a better social network or decentralized digital currency. History suggests both will happen - innovators almost never retain their dominant positions ad infinitum. Indeed, there are signs this may already be occurring.
So far, Facebook shareholders are happy with their dilution. The stock price rose on the purchase of an upstart with no financial track record on which to judge its future success within Facebook. However, the acquisition makes Zuckerberg look fearful. Although Facebook’s business is robust today, it seems that it must make big, near-blind wagers on the next big thing, lest it lose its edge.
The fundamental value of bitcoin is incredibly tricky to pin down. According to the MIT Technology Review, bitcoin was four times more volatile in 2013 than the average stock, and the dollar-bitcoin exchange rate was 10 times more volatile than the dollar rate with major currencies like the euro or yen.
What’s not hard to recognize: bitcoin’s worth has nearly halved since the beginning of December. Whatever the similarities, or differences, between the pseudo-currencies of Facebook shares and bitcoins are, their values are clearly not fixed. Next to selling them, the wisest course of action would be to capitalize on their value. Zuckerberg just did that with Facebook stock in the WhatsApp deal.
Bitcoins created by enthusiast Mike Caldwell are seen in a photo illustration at his office in Sandy, Utah, in this September 17, 2013 file photo. Mt. Gox, once the world's biggest bitcoin exchange, looked to have essentially disappeared on February 25, 2014, with its website down, its founder unaccounted for and a Tokyo office empty bar a handful of protesters saying they had lost money investing in the virtual currency.
REUTERS/Jim Urquhart/Files
A mock Bitcoin is displayed on a table in an illustration picture taken in Berlin January 7, 2014.
REUTERS/Pawel Kopczynski
Mock Bitcoins are displayed on a table in an illustration picture taken in Berlin in this January 7, 2014 file photo. Mt. Gox, once the world's biggest bitcoin exchange, looked to have essentially disappeared on February 25, 2014, with its website down, its founder unaccounted for and a Tokyo office empty bar a handful of protesters saying they had lost money investing in the virtual currency.
REUTERS/Pawel Kopczynski/File
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Imagine that the leading stockbroker in a country closed its doors without giving any reason. Its clients would be in a panic and customers of rival firms would be very nervous. That is exactly what has happened to bitcoin, the leading pseudo-currency.
The website of the Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange in Tokyo disappeared from cyberspace on Tuesday morning, with no explanation provided. The exchange had previously admitted to problems with “transaction malleability,” a bitcoin-world euphemism for susceptibility to hacking.
Internet chat was intense. What looks like an internal memo from the company was circulating the web, stating that there had been thefts from accounts that Mt. Gox customers had assumed were perfectly safe. It is not clear whether the document is genuine. The price of bitcoin on other exchanges dropped 8 percent, down 55 percent from last November’s all-time high, according to bitcoinaverage.com.
If Mt. Gox were an officially licensed broker, the government would be the first port of call. The relevant authorities would investigate and might even make good on some losses under a taxpayer- or industry-funded compensation scheme. Of course, if Mt. Gox had to meet government-mandated security standards, it might not have been allowed to operate without correcting a software vulnerability identified as far back as 2011.
But bitcoin’s central appeal is that it is free from government interference. That is not quite true, since bitcoin cannot make illegal activity legal. Bitcoin entrepreneur Charlie Shrem was an industry leader until his January indictment for attempting to use the techno-currency to launder money.
Still, the distance from the official world is great enough that Mt. Gox customers are almost totally on their own. The purported internal memo suggests that other bitcoin fans might help out, so as to salvage the would-be financial asset’s reputation. That’s a thin reed to cling to.
The expensive regulation and political backstops of conventional money are far from foolproof – look at the recently released Federal Reserve minutes from 2008 to see dysfunction in action. But the system is better than any known alternative, including one based on sophisticated software algorithms.
"The pseudo-currency’s main exchange has disappeared from cyberspace, leaving customers at least temporarily bereft. Bitcoin’s supposed attraction is being government-free. When things go awry, users learn why conventional finance has expensive regulation and political backstops."
Reuters: Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox disappears in blow to virtual currency
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