In the wake of Mt. Gox, a six-figure bitcoin heist has resulted in another shuttered service. This time, the service is Flexcoin, a wallet and banking service that lost 896 bitcoins to attackers, and has announced it will be unable to continue functioning after the loss. The attack emptied the service's hot wallet, where funds were kept for easy access, but the attack did not reach into the offline storage, and Flexcoin has promised to return those funds to customers as soon as possible.

While not as central to the Bitcoin economy as Mt. Gox, the Flexcoin shutdown is another blow to an ecosystem that's facing growing doubts from would-be regulators in government. According to a Flexcoin statement, the company "will attempt to work with law enforcement to trace the source of the hack," but judging by the preemptive shutdown, they do not seem optimistic about recovering the funds. Already, the news has attracted Bitcoin skeptics; as one security researcher put it, "BTC is just too easy to steal to be usable."