To begin this, I'm a 59 year old dad of 4 wonderful children(3 boys 1 daughter).
In December of 2013, I exchanged most of my 401k(My retirement fund) as well as most of my savings, into Bitcoin. That was over $400,000 or around 600 Bitcoin at the time. I believed Bitcoin was the future of all currencies and was set to replace the U.S Dollar following it's inevitable crash.
No, you didn't. I get it you're trying to use the 1st person narrative to get your point across - most likely in the hopes the media picks this up. But it's not going to happen.
See, Mt. Gox wasn't an exchange. It hasn't been for half a year. You couldn't exchange one thing for the other, and actually get hold of the other thing. It was merely a timing-based speculation tool. And it has been for many many months.
By "suspending" the ability to withdraw USD, and not doing an arbitrage against other exchanges, they created a floating rate that was a pure flight of fantasy, held up by the people who speculated on the other side.
So having money in there meant that you were doing extremely high-risk speculation, tantamount to stock options. Everybody on that exchange knew they ran the risk that Mt. Gox could have opened up USD withdrawal again at any moment, which would have caused an instant arbitrage across the Mt. Gox exchange, and a guaranteed 30% collapse.
Yet, people still did it - and fair enough some made money that way, as you could do with stock options. However, nobody at the age of 59 would have put all their life savings into a position that was that risky in the first place. Didn't happen.