What's up with MtGox?

MtGox and certain bitcoin developers have been sniping at each other over MtGox's problems with bitcoin withdrawals. Here's a non-technical summary of the problem. For years it was known that there was a potential vulnerability in the bitcoin protocols. A certain piece of data could be changed to cause a double payment. The bitcoin developers worked around this by telling all the bitcoin client software developers to have their clients ignore this piece of data. All was well.

Unfortunately, MtGox, due to its unique high volume, had to have its own custom client software. And they didn't have time to keep up with this issue. Someone figured out they were vulnerable, and started to take advantage of them.

In a way, MtGox and the developers are both wrong. The developers should have fixed this issue, instead of working around it, and MtGox should have paid more attention to the accepted workaround.

The MtGox fix needs to happen now. The wider fix will take more time. But both need to happen.