If they're considered a Payment Service Agency under Japanese law, no, they don't. Customer funds belong to the customer. Dipping into them is theft.

I don't  understand why everyone didn't leave Mt.Gox when they had the chance. Its not like the writing wasn't on the wall. The warning signs were there months before it became a huge issue. Im just glad I bailed when I did. The whole Mt.gox thing has me wondering what the real truth is. Its terribly ovbious that they are in some sort of hot water.

I almost don't have any sympathy for those that are going to (or have) lose their shirts with mt.gox. Most people that are smart would have bailed a long time ago. Does anyone know how many coins they are supposed to have? I agree that once they allow withdrawals, the bear market will just get much worse.

This whole fiasco has hurt bitcoin.

I don't quite get the gox-is-bad-I-told-ya attitude. The current gox situation is hurting everyone involved in or holding bitcoin, even more so all the fantastic entrepreneurial ideas here. So whatever has been said back then was apparently not loud or clear enough or presented at the wrong channel to prevent the massive damage to the whole system that we're experiencing right now.

Given that there's nothing that the foundation can say or do to make MtGox give people their money back, cease operation or resume operation, they are probably feeling that saying something and then having it have no effect is just going to make them look weak.

It's disappointing that things have got this far with Mark Karpeles on the board of the foundation. That does look bad. However, even then, as one of the founders of the organisation they cannot actually dismiss him.

So while the situation sucks all around, the foundation's behaviour is probably the best they can make of it.

The key word here is PANIC.

Im sure theres plenty of people who bought bitcoins solely on the thought of getting rich quick, nothing else. Possibly quite a few people who invested more money they were willing to lose.  Suddenly the price plunges and people............PANIC

Everyone should just stop panicking.

OMFG.  i can't read this anymore.  a new post, maybe a new topic and pages and pages of repetitive ... .. . 

someone mentioned "signal to noise ratio"

I'm a baby in the game and still knew well enough to SELL SELL SELL when Gox stopped not only fiat withdrawals but btc withdrawals. I made a killing and will make another killing when the value bottoms out on exchanges that actually trade and I reinvest. 

Gox isnt killing Bitcoin,but if anyone thought the low Gox sells werent going to affect other exchanges, well I dont know why they thought it wouldnt.

 Keep up with Gox news and you will know exactly when to buy on other exchanges. If you still had BTC in Gox by the time 'transaction malliability' came back up, maybe you should stick to the stock market!

I tends to guess that mark was trying hard to protect the bitcoin exchange rate but this time he failed

Even a central bank will intervene on Forex market if their currency is depreciating quickly. As an exchange owner, Mark surely can affect the exchange rate of bitcoin by using customer funds (Once the exchange rate can stay relatively stable around a certain level, it can hold itself). And this is contributing to bitcoin's success in early days of bitcoin trading: Limiting the fiat withdraw speed ensured price stability of bitcoin

He used be able to support the exchange rate using customer's fiat money, since the only smooth exit was bitcoin he didn't worry about those coins bought when he absorbed selling pressure

But this time he ran out of fiat money and there were just too many coins dumped by speculators due to no exit for bitcoins.

Another guess: There might be some powerful traders from large banks who accumulated huge amount of bitcoins and want to kill the bitcoin's reputation by crashing the bitcoin exchange rate on most well-known exchange, and they indeed succeeded this time. However they have exhausted their ammunition and never expected that other exchanges were almost unaffected by MTGOX

How exactly it has hurt bitcoin? Because i can't see bear markets hurting bitcoin as much as artificial pressure, like presidents trying to pump the price.

Wouldn't third party hacks and their ramifications make bitcoin custodial holding more popular, and and by that, promoting use cases it's was intended to in the first place (owning your keys).

About mt.gox, i am fairly certain that many people thought it was too big to fail, and that bitcoin wouldn't survive the fall of it anyway.