JUST over a week ago, Schumpeter wrote about the collapse of Mt Gox, the once-dominant Bitcoin exchange that disappeared in late February along with almost half a billion dollars of customers’ cryptocurrency (and $65 million of its own)—all presumed stolen. Schumpeter’s reward for his article was open warfare in the comments section. A large minority of commenters pilloried Schumpeter for daring to criticise their belief in the almighty Bitcoin. The remainder questioned the sanity of anyone believing in what one commenter described as “the currency equivalent of unicorns.” Mt Gox subsequently filed for bankruptcy, after which the formerly elusive Mark Karpeles, Mt Gox’s chief executive, stated that “There was some weakness in the system, and the Bitcoins have disappeared. I apologise for causing trouble.” Given the scale of Mt Gox’s apparent incompetence and the cyberheist itself, this may qualify as understatement of the year.

In the wake of Mt Gox’s implosion, the Bitcoin community closed ranks, with everyone from rival exchanges to the Bitcoin Foundation, the virtual currency’s trade group, assuring Bitcoin users that their funds were safe and, in a crypto-nutshell, that “it couldn’t happen here.” All this while being painfully aware of the many serious bugs, holes and other weaknesses in the Bitcoin ecosystem—and while many virtual-currency businesses were quite visibly under attack from hackers eager to get their hands on the approximately 93% of Bitcoins that remained in circulation after the Mt Gox theft.

On March 3th it became clear that the hackers may be winning. Canada-based flexcoin, which calls itself “the Bitcoin bank”, said it was shutting down after all 896 Bitcoins (worth about $570,000) in its “hot wallet” were stolen. A “hot wallet” is a form of Bitcoin storage that is connected to the internet to facilitate transactions, as opposed to offline “cold storage”. Keeping large amounts of Bitcoin in the hot wallet is generally seen as poor security practice, as those coins are vulnerable to attackers. Flexcoin, it turns out, had a serious flaw in the code that enables transfers between its users. By sending thousands of simultaneous transfer requests, a hacker was able to “move” coins from one user account to another until the sending account was overdrawn, before balances could be updated. This was then repeated through multiple accounts, snowballing the sums involved, until the attacker withdrew all the coins.

The next day Poloniex, which describes itself as “a fast, secure exchange” for trading virtual currencies, said a hacker had exploited a flaw in its software and made off with 12.3% of its Bitcoins. Tristan D’Agosta, Poloniex’s owner, said he takes “full responsibility”, and is “committed to repaying the debt”—eventually. In the meantime the exchange has reduced all its users’ balances by 12.3%, and has frozen withdrawals. Not exactly a triumph for liquidity.

And so the bad Bitcoin news keeps on coming. Japan’s government says it may tax Bitcoin transactions and profits, although keeping track of either will be a challenge. Rumours continue to abound that other Bitcoin businesses are in trouble—some seriously. And on February 28th 28-year-old Autumn Radtke, chief executive of First Meta, a Singapore-based virtual-currency exchange, was found dead in her home, a suspected suicide. As yet, nobody knows if her death was related to her business. No hacks against First Meta have been reported or rumoured.

Rumours, beliefs, flaws, bugs, hacks, heists, exploits... Sometimes it seems that the lingua franca of Bitcoin consists of very little else. Safer, perhaps, to believe in unicorns.