There are bigger and more important things to worry about at the moment for the Japanese ruling party, it would seem.
Reuters reports that the Liberal Democratic Party in the country has decided to not pursue the regulation of digital currency in the aftermath of the collapse of Mt. Gox, a Tokyo-based bitcoin exchange.
“Basically, we concluded that we will, for now, avoid a move towards legal regulation,” Takuya Hirai was quoted as saying. Hirai is a Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker who heads the internet media division of the party. A final decision as to whether or not said regulation will be pursued with depend on additional opinions from within the party.
As mentioned, the collapse of Mt. Gox is really what spurred conversation about bitcoin regulation in the country in the first place.
Following months of unusual withdrawal delays, the Mt. Gox exchange “temporarily” halted withdrawals from their platform on the 7th of February.
Despite being told by the company’s CEO, Mark Karpeles, that more information and re-enabling of the system would be forthcoming, investors were mostly left in the dark.
Finally, on the 24th of February, Mt. Gox disabled trading completely and shortly thereafter took their website offline. Despite the panic raised, few were shocked. The signs of an insolvent exchange were visible months before it happened — but it happened.
It’s pegged as the worst financial disaster in the short history of bitcoin, with over 750,000 bitcoins having seemingly gone missing. As today’s exchange rate, that’s over $450,000,000.
In late March, Mt. Gox delivered an update to the community in which they reported the discovery of a whopping 200,000 bitcoins in a wallet that was thought to have been empty.
To date, community members and investors at the exchange await to hear what went wrong at the exchange, but so far, there have been few (if any) answers.
[textmarker color=”C24000″]Source[/textmarker] Reuters