The ongoing exodus from Mt.Gox - a major Bitcoin exchange - amid withdrawal halts, has seen a massive $150 spread open up between it and other exchanges. Having tumbled by over 50% in the last 2 weeks, Mt.Gox pricing is back at levels first seen 3 months ago. This chaos (and the ongoing 'finger-pointing' over who is to blame) had led Mt.Gox CEO Mark Karpeles to come out swinging in the following interview...

Mt.Gox price for Bitcoin has collapsed...

Leaving the exchanges with very different prices...

Mt Gox chief executive Mark Karpeles – whom some internet forum commenters have angrily criticized after the exchange blamed a flaw in Bitcoin software for a potentially serious security issue – has been in contact with Forbes with a response to the criticisms.

Via Forbes,

FORBES: Was Mt Gox’s coding to blame, and are other exchanges having the same problem?

Mark Karpeles: First, you need to understand that the Bitcoin implementation we use in MtGox was created back in 2011. The bitcoin client is not meant to handle the kind of load MtGox has and was having more and more troubles, lagging and crashing. We created our own implementation to solve those issues and to offer a better flexibility to our customers.

Over time Bitcoin changed and started implementing changes that would require people using previous versions of the software to upgrade. While we followed most of those update[s] we were more and more busy and couldn’t keep up with all the changes.

With bitcoin 0.8.0 (released 19 feb 2013) a breaking change has been included that would prevent transactions to be accepted if their signature did not include the right number of zeroes in front of the signature values (in an effort to reduce risks of transaction malleability). We did not notice this change but a few of the transactions we were sending would become invalid because of this.