hypothetical question for someone who is knowledgeable about bitcoin: since bitcoin is an experiment, what happens if it completely fails? what does a total failure scenario even look like, in terms of symptoms? where does all the 'real' money go? i don't understand how 6% of bitcoin can disappear when one of the supposed selling points is that you can verify all the transactions.
The bitcoins did not disappear. They are on the blockchain just somebody used a bug in Gox's custom php wallet to pillage all the coins for themselves. The official client bitcoind/bitcoin-qt is not affected, and none of the other major sites like blockchain.info or localbitcoins who keep large escrows were affected, just Gox and a drug dealing site who also rolled their own wallet and lost everybody's money.
If you want to work with the raw bitcoin protocol you should pay a Bitcoin developer to help you, then these problems would be avoided. Karpales was making 6 million per month at one point, yet did everything himself (badly). You don't even need to pay them, log into bitcointalk.org and post in the dev base your custom implementation and ask them is this fail y/n?