It's a strange story, that of MtGox, the most well-known Bitcoin exchange site on the internet. They were among the first to promote Bitcoin, to offer a trustworthy service that allows you to buy and sell Bitcoins. Then they got hacked and had to start all over again.
But they started over really well and at the right moment, just as Bitcoin was gaining traction. During a time where almost every week there would be a nice report about yet another Bitcoin site getting hacked and clients having their Bitcoins stolen, MtGox slowly rebuilt. They had my trust because they had already gone through all that. They learned the hard way that you have to be ultra-paranoid if you're running something as vaporous as a virtual money exchange service.
MtGox endured, but strangely enough this is not a good thing. Too large a portion of the Bitcoin economy today is dependent on what happens to MtGox. They've become the enemy of Bitcoin, in a sense, by being a centralized institution that is, simply put, a risk to the distributed network. I'm not just talking technically, but by being in the public image people equate what happens to MtGox as something that happens to 'Bitcoin' as a whole. This is very much against the original concept. The conclusion, therefore, is obvious:
MtGox must die so that Bitcoin may live.
Disclaimer / rant note: I have been waiting for two and a half months for MtGox to transfer me my balance in Euro's via bank transer. They were 6 separate transactions, of which I've only received 3. The only thing I ever heard about why the remaining 3 took so long is that they were "in a queue waiting to be processed by the bank". The utter helplessness of the MtGox staff made it clear that this was not the company to deal with any longer. So I changed the Euro's into bitcoins and rescued them from the MtGox account. A sad day.