25 February 2014 16:31
Theft of digital currency Largest Bitcoin Exchange goes offline
Crisis of confidence for the digital currency Bitcoin : The largest stock exchange Mt Gox has disappeared overnight. Plants worth more than $ 300 million could just be gone.
From Jannis Brühl and Matthias Huber
At a stroke should be gone six percent of all money. Mt Gox , the most important market for digital - and headline-grabbing - Currency Bitcoin is , apparently collapsed. The price of the currency is then slumped massively down. This leads to instability in the community of those who believed in the currency because they considered it a classic cash for superior - or wanted to earn a lot of money with it .
Bitcoins were created by a phantom , a Japanese programmer , from the fact no one knows what he looks like . They are mined by computer solve complex computing tasks . Your total amount is limited to 21 million , the value of a single Bitcoin had risen to more than $ 1,000 this winter. Now, this value has dropped within a few days on the major exchanges to less than half , at the lowest on Mt Gox itself
Mt Gox , headquartered in Tokyo , is in disarray since the weekend . The site is offline, all the tweets of the company have been deleted , CEO Mark Karpeles resigned from his post on the board of the Foundation back , which advocates for the currency.
The makers were not reachable for a day . The Reuters news agency has now received an e -mail from Karpeles . He was working with other leaders in a statement , he writes. The business had reached a "turning point" .
Already on 7th February, Mt Gox - allegedly due to a software error - frozen the money of its users and thus sent the price plummeting .
One possible cause of the sudden from the platform could be a considerable electronic theft. An internal document may , according to whose authenticity has not yet been confirmed , to about 744 000 Bitcoins have been stolen - six percent of all Bitcoins are in circulation. About 120 000 of the stolen Bitcoins should therefore originate from the holdings of Mt Gox itself .
For Mt Gox , the debt to customers up to $ 350 million would amount , calculated at the exchange rate on Monday . The mountain of debt could mean the bankruptcy of the platform. The owners of Bitcoins , which are still stored at Mt Gox , their virtual money would be going on then . Under the domain mtgox.com was only to find a blank Web page . Finally, on Tuesday afternoon it seemed an indication that Mt Gox have all the transactions set "given the coverage and their possible consequences on the market " until further notice. The publication of this notice corresponds to the strategy described in the allegedly internal paper.
" Digital Darwinism "
Critics are likely to feel vindicated by the events at Mt Gox . Several central banks and financial supervisors had warned of Bitcoins . Hold the currency for an uncertain object of speculation in the Gullible could lose a lot of money . Others, like the Winklevoss twins , known by its legal battle with Mark Zuckerberg about the invention of Facebook, speculated on sharply increasing prices of the currency.
Other actors in the scene to minimize the damage : The Chefs Another great Bitcoin exchanges like Coinbase or Octopuses have published a message. You speak of a " tragic violation of trust of the users from Mt Gox " which, however, does not alter the reliability of the currency Bitcoin . Mt Gox can not be considered representative for the industry , the chaos there, they explain with digital Darwinism : " As with any new industry, there are certain bad actors that need to be eradicated , and that we see today . "
Bitcoin investors fear long been a crash of the main trading platform. As early as June last year, sat Mt Gox for several weeks, all disbursements from , in September seemed the problems to be solved. Since 7 February come Investors no longer on their money.
The internal document may , according to the makers of Mt Gox , however, are not at the end. Accordingly, they are pursuing a strategy to elicit the purse out of a huge debt - and then start in a few weeks under new names .
Source:
http://www.sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaf...line-1.1897687