I've been trying to educate people on bitcoin since I knew about bitcoin. I explained to my uncle, who is an attorney, and when we talked 6 months or so ago, the only thing he can remember about bitcoin is the mtgox scam. So, it totally turned him off to bitcoin. Im sure it turned millions off as well. Those that understand it, are used to the scams, unfortunately. but bitcoin is going to be hard to go mainstream with so much bad publicity. plus the mt gox deal wasnt small, hundreds of millions are missing...I feel bad for those that lost money on mtgox, but I saw the writing on the wall way before they went under and was lucky to get all my coins off it. I dont understand why so many people didnt see the signs?
A total of
BTC850,000 and tens of millions of USD in cash was stolen from Mt Gox. But I disagree with you about the warning signals. There were no warnings of any type. Else, most of the users could have withdrawn their coins.
My sign was that withdrawals had stopped, this was about 5 months before they closed, i think or a little shorter. but I couldn't withdraw anything from there, then one day boom, it worked, got every satoshi out of there, plus the govt had seized funds from dwolla and their bank, granted it was because of bad agents, but we didnt know that at the time. To me it was a no brainer. I think ive read some posts here from mt.gox members that basically said the same thing.
But, i think most of the people that lost their coin didnt pay attention to the market like some of us. when I mined, I thought and studied bitcoin all day long. Those that just had a few bucks to invest, just put their faith into mt.gox and missed the signs. its not their fault at all, im just saying.. The ones I dont feel too my sympathy for are those that had the same feelings as myself but did nothing about it. well, i still feel bad, but not as bad as those that didnt have the time to keep track of bitcoin on a daily basis.
i think, like with the bad agents, we will eventually find out what happened. Now we have another possibility in the mix.
it looks that that temptations are hard even for agents.
