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Douglas_Knight comments on [LINK] Raw Story: US seizes operator accounts of a subsidiary of Mt. Gox - Less Wrong
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I don't think it is; you can't even frame it as 'the beginning of the end' because the market doesn't seem perturbed at all - the current MtGox rate is $132!
However, this is a good excuse to post an interesting excerpt I found recently as any. On 11 January 2009, Hal Finney wrote:
If Bitcoin goes to $10m per coin, does that mean we get an anti-anti-Pascal's-mugging rhetorical weapon where we can say '100m to one payoffs do exist in the real world, look at Bitcoin!'?
Yes, if the price on other markets hasn't collapsed, then this isn't terrible news for bitcoin; if the price on MtGox doesn't deviate from other markets, then it isn't terrible news for MtGox. But you seem to imply that a high price on MtGox is a good sign for bitcoin and MtGox. This seems backwards to me: if MtGox were about to collapse, the natural response would be to turn account dollars into account bitcoins and thence real bitcoins, driving up the cost of bitcoins on that system. Or to put it another way, seizing dollars turns account dollars into fractionally backed paper, a third currency that people might not like.
MtGox sees flows in and out every day of a great deal of money through multiple payment systems and conduits; one faucet being turned off doesn't prevent every other flow from instantly and massively reacting to an existential threat to MtGox especially because so many of those users will be non-Americans who are not directly affected by American accounts being frozen; we did not see this massive reaction and panic. Hence the price is a perfectly reasonable indicator of overall confidence in Mtgox.