Earlier today, a small Denver-based precious metals dealer AmagiMetals announced something curious: it would paid its staff in Bitcoin. As it reported in its press release, "its entire staff will voluntarily accept a portion of individual employee paychecks in Bitcoin in 2015 through a new service called Bitwage. CEO of Amagi Metals Stephen Macaskill said the company is taking this action to advance its ability to function fully in Bitcoin going forward. Macaskill will accept $40,000 of his annual salary in bitcoin to demonstrate his support of Bitcoin."

The announcement came on the heels of Amagi Metals’ August 2014 decision to no longer accept U.S. Dollars after 2016.

Whether it is a marketing gimmick, or the PM dealer is one of the few companies to put its (electronic) money where its ideological mouth is, and press for a world without dollar intermediation remains to be seen. However, for the sake of its employees we hope they did not put any part of their bonuses in the Bitstamp exchange which as we learned overnight, was the next big Bitcoin exchange to suffer a major hack following the now defunct Mt. Gox, and where a little over $5 million in bitcoins were stolen.

According to Wired, early Monday, a UK- and Slovenia-based bitcoin exchange Bitstamp announced that it would be going offline while it investigated a security compromise of some portion of its stored currency that occurred over the weekend. In a statement to WIRED, the company said that “less than 19,000? bitcoins were stolen in the attack—about $5.1 million dollars—and warned users to immediately stop making deposits to any addresses it issued before 4 a.m. ET Monday. Meanwhile, Bitstamp users’ money remains frozen in the company’s accounts.

“Bitstamp takes our security and soundness very seriously,” reads a statement on the company’s website. “In an excess of caution, we are suspending service as we continue to investigate. We will return to service and amend our security measures as appropriate.”

Taking a cue from insolvent Europe, the exchange immediately rushed to define what it is by clarifying what it isn't: Bitstamp is not Mt. Gox. Just don't tell that to those were digitally corzined.

The company also tried to reassure users in its statement that they’re not facing a Gox-level debacle. Only the exchange’s “operational wallet” was compromised, it says, a fraction of coins that are frequently bought and sold. Careful exchanges (and users) keep the majority of their bitcoins in “cold storage,” on computers without any connection to the Internet to prevent their theft. “As a security precaution against compromises Bitstamp only maintains a small fraction of customer bitcoins in online systems,” the company’s statement reads. “Bitstamp maintains more than enough offline reserves to cover the compromised bitcoins.” Bitstamp’s chief executive Nejc Kodri? wrote on Twitter: “My sincerest apologies to those who are affected by our service being temporary suspended.” He continued, “Thank you all for your patience. We are working diligently to restore service and hope to have an ETA later today.” In a followup email to WIRED Monday afternoon, Kodri? added that the company is cooperating with law enforcement to get to the bottom of the hack, and is “working to transfer a secure backup of the Bitstamp site onto a new safe environment and will be bringing this online in the coming days.” Bitstamp is far from Bitcoin’s biggest exchange; prior to its suspension it accounted for only about 6 percent of transactions according to bitcoin statistics site Bitcoin Charts. But it had become one of the longest-lived and reputable ways to buy and sell currency in bitcoin’s volatile economy. After Mt. Gox’s bankruptcy, Bitstamp became a popular alternative to top exchanges BTC China, based in China’s uncertain regulatory environment, and BTC-e, a mysterious operation run by unknown owners thought to be based in Bulgaria. “We’re the backbone of the entire Bitcoin industry,” Kodri? told Forbes last year in an interview. “The wallet services, ATM machines, mining companies all rely on us. The price of Bitcoin is the de facto price on Bitstamp. We’re the go-to exchange.” Its temporary shutdown due to the theft of a still-unknown number of coins could rattle bitcoin at a bad time. On Monday morning bitcoin’s price hovered below $270, its lowest since 2013 and down from $375 just a month ago. If Bitstamp doesn’t quickly emerge from its downtime and replace any lost coins, cryptocurrency’s new year could be off to a unpleasant start.

Of course, the Bitcoin advocates will tell you that this hack couldn't possibly have happened and that all those digital monetary equivalents stored "safely" in some hard disk are still there and are a viable alternative to either the fiat in your bank account or the physical gold and silver stored... somewhere else.

In retrospect it is becoming increasingly clear that the collapse of the fiat system will not come from the outside where incidents such as this one do nothing to boost confidence in monetary alterantives, but from within, i.e., the central banks themselves. Then again, since we now live in a world in which only currency devaluation serves to inflate the perception of nominal wealth (recall that in a few short weeks the world will be en route to monetize a record $1.3 trillion in 2015), giving central bankers the key to terminal fiat destruction may be the best option available.