Mt. Gox Bitcoin’s Most Popular Exchange Goes Offline

Rumors of a hack that stole about 12% of the Bitcoins in circulation, might be the cause of the most famous Bitcoin exchange shutdown.

While it's hard to get facts about the alleged hack right now, one thing is for sure. Mt Gox the a popular Bitcoin exchange is offline and only has left this message on the companies homepage.

Dear MtGox Customers,

In the event of recent news reports and the potential repercussions on MtGox's operations and the market, a decision was taken to close all transactions for the time being in order to protect the site and our users. We will be closely monitoring the situation and will react accordingly.

Best regards,
MtGox Team

Not very assuring to the people who jump on the Bitcoin band wagon early and is now "pot invested".

Virtual currency is already a hard concept to get behind. There isn't any real backer like when the gold standard was use to back paper currency. Bitcoin is also an electronic currency making it venerable to hackers.

The only real value behind Bitcoin comes from supply and demand. Someday Bitcoin mining will run out of math problem for the miners and the only Bitcoins we will have left, will be whats in circulation. Believe or not there are people out there that have completely given up paper currency for Bitcoin. With the hopes that the rest of the world will jump on board pushing the value of Bitcoin.

Before the Mt. Gox shutdown a single Bitcoin went for $500 plus, but now the value of Bitcoin is below $200 per "coin".

Asfar as Bitcoin is concerned we have interesting next few days a head of us.