Mt. Gox Says It Has Found 200,000 Bitcoins Worth About $114M

Accidentally finding that much money is embarrassing. MtGox needs to get their act together. I get the whole "it's a wild west crazy time for everyone." But this is insane.

It absolutely does not. It's not the best marketing in the world, but the idea of cryptocurrency and its effective execution are two different things.

According to your logic, malware endangers the idea of computers, or phishing endangers the idea of email. Heck, spoilage endangers the idea of food.

No it doesn't; idiots running terrible businesses will always exist no matter what currency and their existence doesn't reflect on the currency.

There is no "Bitcoin", it is not a corporation. There is no body in charge of it.

Mt. Gox alleged they were stolen via transaction malleability, so yes, it would seem they are "finding" coins that had been "stolen".

> Have BitCoin ever officially explained the reason the BitCoins were gone?

This is analogous to saying:

"Have US Dollar ever officially explained the reason the dollars were gone?" after a bank was robbed.

MtGox has never provided a good reason why they were missing so much in various asset classes. They tried to point to "transaction malleability" early on, but people who have traced such activity say that it can account for only a small fraction of the BTC MtGox claims to be missing.

Insider theft or loss of keys seem to be the most plausible theories, though some people think all the money may simply have been gambled away trying to recover losses incurred earlier.

Some folks over on Reddit, btw, claim to also have found an additional 300,000 BTC still under MtGox's control. This is perhaps support for the "missing keys" theory, or perhaps simply "gross incompetence".

The bitcoins that were just found were in wallets that haven't been used since 2011. They are not the same wallets affected by the recent problems.