"Magic the Gathering: Online Exchange" has magically gathered all your online bitcoins and exchanged them for ... something or other. More here. For once, do read the comments—it's hysterically funny, in a sad way, to watch the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.

C'mon, folks. Mt. Gox was a trading card swap mart set up by an amateur coder and implemented in PHP! And you expected NSA-levels of trusted computing security, so you trusted your money to it? (Oops. Let's make that better than NSA levels of security.) I've written software that handled financial transactions for a dot-com startup—a payment service provider, now a subsidiary of Mastercard. Been there, got the scars. (Do not ask me about the time our main production server got hacked three months before we went public: I still have PTSD. ( Intrusion detected within 15 minutes; hacker targeted by law enforcement and corporate lawyers within 24 hours: nevertheless. ))

You can't do this shit on an amateur basis and not get burned. Handling money makes you a target: the more money, the bigger the bullseye: and you can't write secure software on the run or patch up a proof of concept to production quality on a shoestring budget. Datacash grew from a tiny seed (about 30 credit card transactions in our first three months) to something that was handling around 20,000 transactions per server per day when I left in early 2000, following 30% compound growth per month for an extended period; the early codebase was retired as rapidly as was feasible, the company had penetration testers, an in-house crypto specialist, and coding standards with test harnesses and QA well before it was handling 10% of MtGox's turnover ... and still shit happened. From what I've read, I'm not convinced that MtGox ever understood what financial security entails. But the fault isn't theirs alone. The real fault lies with Bitcoin itself.

A real currency with a fiscal policy and the backing of a state that could raise loans would be able to ride out this insult. It'd be extraordinarily painful, but it wouldn't devastate the currency in perpetuity. But Bitcoin doesn't have a fiscal policy: it wears a gimp suit and a ball gag, padlocked into permanent deflation and with the rate of issue of new "notes" governed by the law of algorithmic complexity.

Someone please take my bottomless bowl of popcorn? I've eaten so much I think I'm going to be sick.