WIRED: Bitcoin’s Oldest Exchange, Now in Shambles

Wired writes:

It was once the only serious bitcoin exchange on the internet. But now, just a year later, Japan’s Mt. Gox is in shambles.

U.S. regulators have seized more than $5 million of the company’s money. Customers report month-long delays in getting their U.S. dollars out of the exchange. And now a technical glitch has prevented the exchange from paying out in bitcoins too, effectively locking away customer assets until further notice[...]

“It seems very likely to me that for some reason [Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles] is not able to work on his codebase anymore, and isn’t able to resolve bugs in a timely manner, leaving his support staff to try and clean up the mess by making horrible hacks like “throw away and retry later’,” wrote Mike Hearn, a respected Bitcoin developer on a Bitcoin Foundation discussion forum “The question in my mind then becomes – where is Mark and what is he doing?”

One Redditor says he flew from Australia to Japan in an attempt to withdraw his bitcoins. He met Karpeles in front of the Gox office, but never got his money back.