Watching the bitcoin ticker (http://bitcointicker.co/#) you can see the tug-of-war bgoing on between people who are trying to pull the price lower and those who are trying to maintain it. Over the last few hours it's been a complete trainwreck, millions of dollars disappearing every few minutes and so on.
OK, you could watch the currency markets do this for real money all day but most of the time they trade on fundamentals. Watching a currency crisis unfold is a lot more interesting.
Unrelated: I see redditors are handing out 1:1 sympathy tips in DogeCoin.
On one hand I feel really bad for a lot of these people, but there were so many flashing lights and warning signs around MtGox that these people had to see putting money into this company was a bad idea right?
The exchange was a cobbled-together technical-mess that was originally supposed to be used for trading cards. They made a quick pivot and tried to wing it as a financial institution.
Hopefully the BTC and finance community learn from this disaster. There is going to be a huge market for a highly-regulated exchange run by banks and investment houses in the near future.
Yeah, the only possible excuse is if you were new to Bitcoin and went with Gox because it is what was mentioned in the media most often. When I first got into it a year ago I used Gox for a couple weeks before I realized it was totally FUBAR and got out.
One person lost 1998 btc. That was anywhere from $500,000 to a million bucks.