When i first looked at Bitcoin 6 months ago, it was to determine if it was a system or a scheme.
I decided it was a system. In looking at Mt. Gox, I have an account there, I decided a system
where there were already plenty reports of hacking attempts etc. was not a place to
have an online wallet. So, while Mt. Gox failed, I lost nothing since I stored nothing
there or at any other exchange.

For those of you that did, tough luck. Expensive lesson. Next time, do your homework.

A Mt. Gox BK and any associated lawsuits simply enables the foes of Bitcoin to pour lots of bad publicity into
the media engine, who simply repeat what they hear, in most cases. That's not good for
Bitcoin, and I am sorry to see that.

I hope my wallet is safe. Sadly, I am too inept at this point to be really sure.  I encrypted it
with a long passphrase and stored a backup in two secure places, one a thumb drive. I would
consider a thumb drive the basic equivalent of a hardware wallet, but I am unsure, since I
don't know where the private key is stored or whether its stored securely. SO, I have some
homework to do. If I am lucky, some nice participant here will suggest how things work.
That does not remove my need to do homework. It just changes my to do list to vouch what
that person says, since I do not trust any word of anyone anywhere at anytime except the words
of my family. That's just me, skepticism is a good method to screen out the wackos :-)
You all can do what you please.

In the bigger picture, Mt. Gox is a failure of Bitcoin and its league of developers. You all knew of the
problem and didn't fix it. Now, I hope the developers have more motivation to fix it.

OR perhaps they should not. Perhaps online wallets and centralized exchanges simply are inappropriate
features that should die while Darwin smiles.  That's my contribution here.

Think before you act. The choices made now may reverberate for quite some time. It reminds me of the choice Gates made at MS. He chose
not to follow the existing security model of Unix available at that time for DOS 1.0. That was a bad choice
but obviously he overcame that flaw. Sort of, anyway :-)