Saturday, March 1, 2014

Lessons from the MTGOX fiasco

Bitcoin Magazine
Bitcoin Magazine (Photo credit: zcopley)
As we've all heard, MTGOX has gone under. Now I'm sure we've all heard this because it's all over the mainstream news. It's everywhere. It's a scandal. Ergo, it's newsworthy and deserves to be reported on. They don't understand what is it they're reporting on but they said it anyway. Which questions the quality of news you actually get from mainstream news..
But back to MTGOX. Some say it's a tragedy, some say it was timebomb that finally went off. All we can do is learn from it. And here are the top 5 things to learn from the demise of MTGOX.

  1. If you believe in BITCOIN, so will others. So much so, they'll steal it from you. Money isn't evil, it just drives people into doing evil things. So virtual money will drive people to do evil virtually.
  2. You need better security to protect bitcoin transactions, better than those used to protect trading card swaps. Apparently Magic just won't cut it
  3. Like in the real world, don't expect other virtual banks to bail your virtual bank out of trouble. It's the government's job apparently and they're still trying to get the spelling of bit-coin right. With dash or without.. And like the real world, the other virtual banks have thrown MTGOX under the bus, claiming that it was 'rogue'.
  4. The bitcoins that were stolen were not lost, like the mainstream news reported. The total amount of bitcoins that were stolen were about 7% of all bitcoins in the world. Why would anyone steal all those bitcoins and not spend it later. Unless the point was to destroy Bitcoin's reputation. Who would want to do that? After all that time and effort to hack MtGOX? .. except someone who feels threaten by it.. perhaps...er.. forget about what I said. Is that a drone humming above?
  5. . ... and finally, if you're gonna steal virtual currency from va irtual bank, steal everything. Everyone will be so upset with the bank, they'll stop looking for you. Really, how many people have you heard talking about getting the guys who did this? Why not go after the people who did this? Unless.. that drone is getting closer isn't it.

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