Following Mt. Gox trading halt, Bitcoin collapses under the $100 mark

Here we go again. Following yesterday’s Bitcoin crash, the top exchange for the digital currency Mt. Gox decided to temporarily halt trading. The result? Bitcoin is hitting new lows.

Since Mt. Gox is currently closed for business, we can’t use its figures (the last trade was for a value $124.90). We thus have to turn to other sites, such as Bitcoinity, which tracks other exchanges (the below image is specifically for btce):

At the time of writing, we’re seeing prices of about $65. For the sake of comparison, Bitcoin hit a high of $266 yesterday (its highest yet) before tumbling down to $150 and hitting a low of about $130.

Now, with Mt. Gox out of the picture, prices on different exchanges are all below $100. Here are a few of the most recent trades from Bitcoin Watch:

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btceUSD – 63.0000
bitstampUSD – 61.4900
bitfloorUSD – 68.9900
cbxUSD – 64.0000
btc24USD – 65.0000
vcxUSD – 58.0000
rockUSD – 64.0000
icbitUSD – 99.0000

That’s the huge influence that Mt. Gox currently holds on the Bitcoin market. The company explains what happened on Wednesday:

Indeed the rather astonishing amount of new account opened in the last few days added to the existing one plus the number of trade made a huge impact on the overall system that started to lag. As expected in such situation people started to panic, started to sell Bitcoin in mass (Panic Sale) resulting in an increase of trade that ultimately froze the trade engine!

To give you an idea of how impressive things were here are some numbers that we would love to share with you guys:
– The number of trades executed tripled in the last 24hrs.
– The number of new account opened went from 60k for March alone to 75k new account created for the first few days of April! We now have roughly 20,000 new accounts created each day.

Right, but what about Thursday (today)? Well, it seems this is the important part: “Also please note that we may have to close the exchange for two hours in the next 12 to 24hrs to add several new servers to our system.”

That’s what should have happened. Instead, the company later posted an announcement titled “Market Cooldown for 12 hours”:

Orders will not be accepted for the moment as we need to upgrade our database to accommodate the trading volume. However, you may still cancel your pending and open orders. Trading will resume at 11.00 am JST. Our apologies for the inconvenience caused and thank you for your patience while we work to resolve this issue.

Now Bitcoin is back in the double digits, currently sitting at $65. We’ll update you as it continues to fluctuate wildly.