MtGox Hacked - Traders Move To TradeHill, Bitcoin7

The biggest Bitcoin currency exchange, MtGox, was hacked on Sunday 19, 2011. The announcement was made when the Bitcoin price plummeted from around $17 to one cent in a matter of minutes. The drop in price was the result of all Bitcoins in a hacked account being sold. The account had so many Bitcoins that eventually it was selling them at a rate of just a cent.

Warning For MtGox

If you have used the same login name and/or password on another common site like Gmail or PayPal, It's best that you change your password immediately!
Consider using TradeHill or Bitcoin7 for your future Bitcoin trades. It's safer and cheaper. If you already have a TradeHill account, make sure to use a different password than your MtGox account.

Mt Gox had to take down their site and it has since been relaunched after a long and painful process of trying to recover as many of the accounts as possible.

Alternatives To Mt Gox

We recommend avoiding MtGox until they have secured their platform. Below, you see a number of safer alternatives for trading Bitcoin.

TradeHill Bitcoin Market

In order to trade Bitcoin in a safe and uninterrupted environment, it's recommended to create an account at the TradeHill Bitcoin market site at tradehill.com.

TradeHill Offering Cheaper Trading Than Mt gox

If you sign up through the link above or by specifying the referral code TH-R19362 during sign up, you will pay 10% less in commission on all trades that you make.

Go to TradeHill and create your account ⇒

Bitcoin7 Exchange

Bitcoin7 offers a faster sign up procedure and a better presentation of your available funds, recent trades and history than Mt Gox.

Supports over 20 different payment methods world wide. Europe based. Supporting most European languages (Of course including English).

You can choose to buy Bitcoins instantly from Bitcoin7 or trade on the market with other people.

Go to Bitcoin7 and create your account ⇒

What Exactly Happened to Mt Gox?

In order to verify the story, I have verified that the leaked database from Mt. Gox appears to be the real thing. The leaked data is user id, user name, email and a password hash.

Luckily, the password hash is not a basic md5 hash. Mt Gox say claims that it is using freeBSD MD5 salted hashing, for all but tine old and idle accounts.

The MtGox database that is now publicly available for download at some filesharing peer-to-peer networks appears to contain a little over 61 000 rows.

MtGox trading has now been resumed, but at the time of writing, the site still suffers from slow performance.

Mt. Gox Hack Not Affecting Bitcoin At Large

Fortunately, the Mt Gox hack appears only to have affected the Bitcoin value at Mt Gox, rather than the overall value. The Bitcoin exchange TradeHill has been handling trades without mayor interruptions during the whole period.

The whole ordeal has been bad news for the Bitcoin currency, that has been increasing in rapidly the last few months. During the spring, the currency has been rising from $1 to over than $30 at its peak.

The theft of the $500,000 Bitcoins at MtGox raised fears that too many Bitcoiners would want to cash out when the trading opened again, but this appears not to have been the case. Interruption of the trading at Mt. Gox just resulted in an increase of trading at the TradeHill and Bitcoin7 markets.