Found 'em up your butt and around the corner, sucker.

How idiotic can you be? Converting your life savings to a trendy nerd currency less dependable than Linden dollars? Are you a lunatic, or was the promise of a new tax-free future living out of your bug-out bag too much to ignore?

MtGox, the largest exchange of bitcoin to real money, has just effectively vanished, taking over 750,000 bitcoins along with it. It's not clear where they went, but they've probably been stolen.

If you're not sure what bitcoin is, imagine for one second a currency that creates scarcity based on loser do-nothings leaving their computers on all the time. And this creates value because... those same nerds say it does. And the guys with the most powerful computers are obviously able to generate the most of it. Not only that, it's a crazy idea built on software written by an anonymous mystery guy, and bitcoins can't really even be traced. It's like a bad dystopian novel, all it's missing is a bunch of steampunk and references to linux.

Oh, and the primary use of bitcoin throughout its lifetime has been to buy drugs and guns. Legitimate currency, indeed. (Full disclosure: I once traded a pretty good pistol in Borderlands 2 for a sixer of real life beer, so I'm not entirely innocent here.)

Honestly, this was a really fantastic pseudo-intellectual libertarian thought experiment, but it looks like practically everyone on the face of the earth is laughing at the naivete that had to have been involved here. Specifically if you lost money. And especially if you lost a lot of money.

Let's not forget that in the pursuit of this magical currency that appears on your computer without you doing any work, that some guys have injured their brains from the heat generated by their magic alchemy machines. Some guys also dried fruit with the heat, but hey, at least the fruit is worth something.

In a way, we should feel worse for those who didn't lose their bitcoins. The price is tanking rapidly as of this writing. Holders of their Monopoly money will have to clutch it to their chest, knowing their precious computer money is worth less than 20% of what it used to be. That haunting feeling of "I should've sold a month ago" will haunt them forever. Thousands of dollars, or in some cases much more, simply lost. Good lord.

I'd like to share with you some screenshots of posts happening right now where these cutting-edge digital renegades are showing off how much money they've lost in the last day alone. Keep in mind that you can multiply any of these numbers by $1100 or so, as that's what bitcoins were worth at their height. Some folks lost money in the millions of dollars.

















































































– Jon "@fart" Hendren (@fart)