Bitcoin is having a bad day. Mt. Gox, once the world’s foremost bitcoin exchange, an online platform where people trade the digital currency for U.S. dollars, is gone—at least for now, and perhaps for good. Mt. Gox’s trading platform is offline, its Twitter account has been scrubbed, and its C.E.O., Mark Karpeles, has resigned from the board of directors of the Bitcoin Foundation, a trade group that promotes bitcoin adoption. Earlier this month, Mt. Gox suspended bitcoin withdrawals, citing technical problems that could allow for fraudulent transactions while a fix was implemented. To customers, that was worrisome enough, but in the past twenty-four hours the site first halted all trading activity and then vanished altogether, leading to rumors of insolvency and impending bankruptcy.

The troubles at Mt. Gox could put in jeopardy the future of bitcoin, a kind of electronic cash that can be sent anywhere in the world without involving banks or credit-card companies. Units of the digital currency are stored in virtual “wallets,” either online or on computer hard drives, and can be traded for dollars, euros, and other national currencies through online exchanges. While critics believe there is a bitcoin bubble—its price rose last year from thirteen dollars to more than eleven hundred dollars—others think bitcoins could transform financial services and global commerce.

Mt. Gox is based in Tokyo, but so far Japanese authorities have declined to get involved. Japanese police have even removed protesters who were demonstrating outside Mt. Gox’s office for several days. “Bitcoin isn’t a currency; it works as an alternative to currencies, like gold,” a spokesman of the Financial Services Agency, Japan’s banking regulator, told the Wall Street Journal on Monday. “The FSA is in charge of currency-based services. Therefore, Bitcoin exchanges are not a subject to our regulatory oversight.”

Bitcoin business leaders are doing damage control. Fred Ehrsam, a co-founder of the bitcoin wallet and exchange platform Coinbase, along with the heads of five other companies, released a statement pledging to “lead the way” in coming up with consumer-protection measures after “this tragic violation of the trust of users of Mt. Gox.” The statement, published on the Web sites of Coinbase and the other big bitcoin companies, says that “responsible Bitcoin exchanges are working together and are committed to the future of Bitcoin and the security of all customer funds.” These companies include Bitstamp and BTC China, two of the world’s largest exchanges by trading volume.

Despite these assurances, the value of a single bitcoin plunged overnight, dropping as low as four hundred and five dollars, as listed on Coinbase, from six hundred and twelve dollars on Sunday. By 7:05 P.M. East Coast time on Tuesday, it had recovered to five hundred and fifty-one dollars. Even so, the cryptocurrency has lost more than half its value since the heady days of late November, when a single bitcoin briefly surpassed the value of an ounce of gold. Bitcoin’s market cap now stands at $6.39 billion, according to Winkdex, a new bitcoin price index from the venture capitalists Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (who are better known for scrapping with Mark Zuckerberg over the ownership of Facebook).

All of this is red meat for bitcoin skeptics. But even the shock of Mt. Gox’s potential bankruptcy is unlikely to kill the digital currency, which has long since gone global. According to a report last month from the Law Library of Congress, bitcoin is being discussed and used in at least forty foreign nations, whose governments’ responses range from outright bans to a refusal to regulate it. American consumers are now using bitcoin to buy home goods from Overstock.com and electronics from TigerDirect. The second coming of Dutch tulip mania it is not.

More interesting, then, is to look at how Bitcoin might recover. Consider the features of this crisis: rampant speculation, the threatened collapse of a landmark company, the evaporation of value, a crisis of public confidence, business leaders banding together to save the day. We have been here before, and with the U.S. financial industry.

In 1907, before the creation of the Federal Reserve, the United States was an emerging market. When the copper magnate Fritz Augustus Heinze attempted to manipulate the stock of his company, United Copper, and failed, it triggered a run on banks, first in New York City and then nationwide, according to John Steele Gordon’s “The Great Game: The Emergence of Wall Street as a World Power, 1653-2000.” Stocks eventually lost nearly half of their value. Depositors showed up at the Manhattan headquarters of the Knickerbocker Trust Company, one of several suffering institutions, to demand their money. An auditor discovered that its coffers were empty, and the bank closed. “The bank’s president, Charles Barney, shot himself several weeks later, prompting some of the bank’s outstanding depositors to commit suicide as well,” Charles R. Geisst writes in “Wall Street: A History.”

John Pierpont Morgan took it upon himself to resolve the crisis, pledging millions of dollars of his own money to bail out failing institutions, and convincing other bankers and business leaders, including John D. Rockefeller, Sr., to do the same, Gordon writes. According to Geisst, Morgan also persuaded the U.S. Treasury to provide twenty-five million dollars in bailout funds (about six hundred and twenty-five million dollars in 2013 terms). Their actions brought an end to the financial contagion, and by December, 1909, stocks had surpassed their previous record high. But that wasn’t enough to save the status quo—that is, a market with no central bank. Six years after the “panic of 1907,” the government established the Fed, which would inject money into the market during times of low cash reserves. Decades later, the Securities Act of 1933 required issuers of securities to disclose information that potential investors might need as they decided whether to invest.

There are many differences between 1907 and 2014, and between the mainstream American financial industry and the bitcoin world. But there are similarities, too. Whether Mt. Gox is permanently closed, its troubles may hasten regulators’ efforts to draft oversight rules for digital-currency businesses. Last week, Benjamin Lawsky, the superintendent of New York’s department of financial services, answered questions on the social news site Reddit about his plans. In the meantime, surviving bitcoin businesses are rallying to “reestablish the trust squandered by the failings of Mt. Gox,” the joint statement reads.

Coinbase’s Ehrsam and many of his colleagues seem prepared to accept future regulations. They may even welcome them, because they could raise the barriers to entry for competing startups. Indeed, the companies’ joint statement says that because of the “critical custodial role” over assets that bitcoin businesses play on behalf of customers, “acting as a custodian should require a high bar.” What requirements do they have in mind? Security safeguards to prevent theft—“independently audited and tested on a regular basis”—also with sufficient reserves to function as commercial entities, disclosures to customers, and “clear policies to not use customer assets for proprietary trading or for margin loans in leveraged trading.” So far, so mainstream.

Soon after news of the Mt. Gox troubles broke, CoinDesk, a bitcoin news site, published a version of the statement from Ehrsam and his peers that included the sentence, “It does not appear to any of us that Mt. Gox followed any [of] these essential requirements as a financial services provider.” That sentence was removed from later versions of the statement. An anonymous document purporting to outline Mt. Gox’s internal comeback strategy has also since been leaked. All this leaves open the possibility that the exchange may rise from the ashes. To do so, according to the document, the company would jettison Karpeles as C.E.O. and rename itself Gox. Part of Mt. Gox’s plan to reduce its hundred and nineteen million dollars of liabilities allegedly involves “informing and asking selected Bitcoin main players for their help…. Injections in coin are most useful (enough to run the exchange) but some cash is also needed to not run a fractional reserve.”

As of now, the bitcoin community has no J. P. Morgan who has stepped forward publicly to pledge his own money in an attempt to rescue Mt. Gox. But deals could be struck behind the scenes. Whether or not Mt. Gox returns—and a brief statement newly posted to its otherwise empty Web site suggests that it might (transactions are closed “for the time being,” it says)—it’s hard to be entirely surprised by the events of the past twenty-four hours. “Bitcoin is absolutely the Wild West of finance, and thank goodness,” Erik Voorhees, the founder of the bitcoin startup Coinapult, said in an interview with Bitcoin Magazine last year. “It represents a whole legion of adventurers and entrepreneurs, of risk takers, inventors, and problem solvers. It is the frontier. Huge amounts of wealth will be created and destroyed as this new landscape is mapped out.”

Brian Patrick Eha is writing a book about the global phenomenon of bitcoin for Portfolio, a division of Penguin Random House. He is a former editor at Entrepreneur.com and a freelance journalist who lives in New York.

Photograph by Stephen Lam/Reuters.