850,000 BitCoins gone
BitCoin exchange website MtGox has filed for bankruptcy protection in Japan. Apologizing at a news conference at the Tokyo District Court, MtGox CEO Mark Karpeles added that the focus now is to reduce the impact saying, “The BitCoin industry is healthy and it is growing. It will continue, and reducing the impact is the most important point.”

Karpeles attributed blame for the site’s collapse to “a weakness in our system” while it was revealed that 750,000 of users’ BitCoins were lost with the website losing 100,000 of its own. Estimation of the lost crypto-currency’s value is somewhere around $480 million based on the current worth of BitCoin at $563.

The bankruptcy filing follows weeks after the website had halted trade of BitCoin, after claiming it had found a bug in the BitCoin software that allowed users to alter transactions. This claim was quickly refuted by BitCoin developers who said that the issue being experienced by MtGox was a pre-existing issue called transaction malleability.

In the wake of the issues revolving around MtGox, the value of BitCoin has continued to decline in the month of February. Back in January, the crypto-currency was valued in the ballpark of $800 as sites, such as TigerDirect and Xidax had started to accept it as payment. Now, with the bankruptcy filing of MtGox, the value is about $548 and still dropping.

source http://www.maximumpc.com/mtgox_files_bankruptcy_480_million_lost_2014