If you trusted a company that started out trading Magic: the Gathering cards with a significant amount of your money, you probably need the lesson you are going to learn from this.
Anybody who trusts THOSE idiots with their money deserves to lose it.
Howabout those dorks that started out as a school project and went on to become google.
You'd be double, double stupid to work for, trust money to, advertise on that stupid dorky company that started off as a hott or not clone.
Paypal, OTOH, started out as a financial service and was designed as one from the beginning, and proven itself reliable. But even so, most people know not to leave large amounts of money in their Paypal accounts, and to make regular deposits into a proper bank account.
The site never really worked as a cards exchange.
However, I agree that given Mt. Gox record of fuck ups, I would never put any large sums there.
I don't know the likelihood of that honestly but I would certainly be more ashamed of my own government than already this month if it was simply "appropriated" and not returned or counted.
They're surviving because they're not letting go of any of the USD they have, or at a trickle. I've heard numbers along the lines of they had $10M in April. They can't pay salaries and infrastructure costs in BTC, so they're holding on to what $ they have for as long as they can. Eventually they'll have to start releasing their BTC into the market to get $ out, but they know that will have a negative effect.
Oh, I forget. Mafia dictates what's good for your health and educates your children because it gives you a great service: protection against other mafias. And the price for that service is not fixed. You have to give up half of your income.
With Bitcoin you have no legal guarantees at all.