Quote from: CWestermark on February 26, 2014, 01:15:14 PM

BTC was here so that people would not have to wory about loosing their funds.

Mt. Gox is/was an exchange and should never have been considered any type of "safe" storage or wallet. I only used Mt. Gox a few times but each time I put USD in as quickly as possible, made my trades, and took my bitcoin out. I never actually went the other direction. But, if I did, I would have put my bitcoin in, sold it, and taken my USD out as quickly as possible.

The problem here is that people got complacent and forgot about security and safe money handling principles. There were warning signs and red flags for months. I got an email from Mt. Gox I think it was around the beginning of December stating that in the next few weeks they were planning on shutting down Mt. Gox for several weeks while they updated their code. The first thing I did was login to make sure that my balances were emptied (by me). This should have been a red flag to everyone. If, after that point, you wanted to continue to trade on Mt. Gox, you should only have done so only with an amount you were prepared to lose.

Would anyone have been so careless with dollar bills? Imagine there was a place you could put your dollars and you could move dollars in and out as you pleased but there was always the possibility this place could close down and you would not have access to any dollars you had in there. Oh wait, these places do exist. We call them banks. And there is always the possibility that one could shut down (and there isn't enough money in FDIC to cover all of us). We need a different kind of currency, one that is immune to such bank runs. Oh wait, we have Bitcoin (and other virtual currencies). Bitcoin was not the problem here, it was the mentality of people trusting Mt. Gox (or any other institution) with their Bitcoin.

I feel bad for everyone who lost money to Mt. Gox, I truly do. But maybe this will underscore the need for protecting OUR OWN assets. People blamed the mortgage companies for giving them loans they couldn't afford. They blamed Bernie Madoff for taking their money without having done any research and having no clue what he was actually doing with it before handing it over. And people blame Mt. Gox for stealing their money even though they ignored all warning signs and left all their money with them. But how many people are taking personal responsibility?

In the end, I think the closing of Mt. Gox will be a very positive thing. Something new WILL come up and take its place. Necessity is the mother of invention and someone WILL come up with a safer, easier wallet for those technically challenged individuals. Others will find ways of educating individuals on how to properly handle this new type of currency. And someone will figure out a better way of bridging the gap between people's everyday currency that they're so used to and this new type of crypto currency. The Mt. Gox fiasco of 2014 takes us two steps back but we will take five steps forward as a result. Perhaps it will be one of those individuals who was fleeced who will take this as his motivation for making it happen and in the end make himself very wealthy as a result.