MtGox Goes Down.. Bitcoin Trading Halted Till Later Today

You may have noticed some crazy arbitrage situations with pricing of bitcoins from different sellers in the past hour. Causing the disruption is an announcement from MtGox, the main Exchange that it is halting trading activity.

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.

This follows yesterday's disruption at MtGox. Explaining the problem, the exchange stated that due to a surge in new account volume and demand, they are experiencing technical issues and are upgrading their servers to compensate.

In terms of trading, bitcoins definitely have it all down. We have rallies, crashes, market halts, and manipulation. The question though is how will this impact merchants who are accepting bitcoins or thinking about doing so and need to factor in how the Volatility will effect their payment processing and collection.