A few days ago, anonymous hackers took over the Reddit account and personal blog of the shuttered MtGox’s CEO. They used the accounts to post an angry letter accusing him of stealing Bitcoins from his website’s users, and posted a 750Mb zip file comprising information stolen directly from MtGox’s servers.

Some members of the Bitcoin community have found their own transactions in the leak, which should mean that it was genuine. The hackers themselves added they were very careful to strip out any passwords from the posted database, but some reports suggest that a second scam could be involved there, as an app contained within the zip file could steal people’s Bitcoin wallets.
The attackers point at one particular line in the data – it shows the largest virtual currency exchange as holding 951,000 Bitcoins at the time of its collapse and is therefore a proof of the exchange’s malfeasance. However, the critics point out that MtGox’s internal accounts could be out of sync with the amount of money they actually held.
This leak followed a stinging attack on Bitcoin as a currency by Nouriel Roubini, known as an influential economist. He said that, apart from a base for criminal activities, Bitcoin is not a currency at all, as it is not a unit of account because no price of goods and services is set in Bitcoin unit nor it ever will.
Instead, Roubini claimed that Bitcoin is between a Ponzi game and a conduit for criminal activities. A Ponzi (also known as “pyramid”) scheme relies on taking money from members joining it to pay out as interest to earlier members. Therefore, it is unsustainable. For example, Bernie Madoff operated a giant pyramid scheme, for which he was jailed. In addition, pyramid schemes were blamed for a collapse in the Albanian economy in 1996, after they amounted to almost 50% of the country’s GDP. Their collapse was followed by civil war and thousands of deaths.
However, less damage seems to have been caused by a website called “Ponzicoin”. The latter offered 120% repayments on Bitcoins via an openly acknowledged pyramid scheme – illegal in some countries. According to the portal’s operator, all Bitcoin depositors have been refunded, and he blamed hackers for compromising his website, making it appear that he had run off with their money.