Bitcoin Forum

It's clear that somebody wants us to believe that MtGox is being bought by a third party. The facts:

1) Somebody has leaked the following document: http://es.scribd.com/doc/209050732/MtGox-Situation-Crisis-Strategy-Draft

No explicit mention to Gox being sold, but a lot of explicit mentions to re-branding, etc.

Very unlikely to be an internal doc (at least as it is), but some of the info might not be completely false. Five minutes after the "leak" of this document MtGox website disappeared and trading was halted. Previously to that all the feed of their tweeter account was deleted. Just yesterday "gox.com" was registered apparently by Mark Karpeles himself, and now redirects to mtgox.com. Everything seems to support the "leaked document" discourse.

2) Somebody inside MtGox wants us to believe it will be sold/acquired imminently. The below comment can be read on mtgox.com HTML code, and the one who placed it knows very well that comment would have been seen by everybody and thus "leaked" to the masses:


3) Karpeles just replied to a Reuters reporter, implying Gox was about to be sold. The question was: "is MtGox dead"? The literal answer: "We should have an official announcement ready soon-ish. We are currently at a turning point for the business. I can't tell much more for now as this also involves other parties."

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/25/us-bitcoin-mtgox-ceo-idUSBREA1O12T20140225

Summing up: somebody wants us to believe Gox will be bought by someone, very soon.

Who do you believe is so crazy to buy such a destroyed brand? My personal view right now is that nobody sane would pay for Gox - there has been no time for a due diligence and it looks unlikely somebody would throw money to Gox during this shitstorm, this a simple re-branding and a make-up action is much more likely in my opinion.

Anyhow, there's too little info to be sure of anything yet.

What do you think? Who could be the mysterious buyer? Speculate.

Situation getting more interesting. I dont see any movie done like this. MTGOX and their dids.

Chancelor on the brink of third bailout for MtGox

If WhatsApp's user base was worth 19B to Facebook then Mtgox's user base is probably worth something to someone as well, especially if you are the one "saving" them from the "evil" Mtgox, goodwill goes a long way.

My question: to whom? And... Right now? An acquisition takes months, if not years. Due diligences are lenghty processes. You just do not make a phone call and throw an offer out of your ass.

So, has Karpeles been in negotiations to sell Gox for many months? And again: to whom?

Is it just me or does this remind you of weexchange and their "we're going to announce something soon"

WTF is going on with all these useless exchanges?!?

Who would be stupid enough to buy Mt. Gox?   The liability to account holders is huge and the mingling of client funds with operating funds is likely criminal.    Who is stupid enough to take that liability on in order to get "customer" names?   There are no assets.    The name is a synonym for fucking customers over and ranks up there with the "brand" power of Butterfly Labs.   It is like someone begging to buy Madoff Securities for the great list of investors and all the goodwill that is in the brand name.

Right now on mtgox.com:


"In the event of recent news"??? So they have shut down all the operations WITHOUT PRIOR ANNOUNCEMENT because of "recent news"? What news?

Gox is really treating their customers like fools. Angry mobs with pitchforks are completely justified at this point.

everybody was screaming for days, why don't Gox close trading too, blablablah

Now they do

You got what you asked for.  :-\

you made my day. :D

This is now posted on their website.

Come on it's not what people asked for. Trading is trading. A website is something else.

For me it's the lack of communication. At this stage do anything, literally anything... just f***ing communicate properly!

There is no way a buyer will surface.  Assuming a buyer could be found and bitcoins returned to the site, everyone with an ounce of intelligence would immediately withdraw all their bitcoins as quickly as possible.  The way MtGox has been performing over the past few months and the abrupt shutdown pretty much precludes an orderly buyout and restart.

Who would want to buy Mtgox, They are being sued for 75 Million by coinlabs, they have 10+ million seized by coinlabs and the US gouv. They owe 10's of millions to their clients.

Mtgox is the worst buy ever. The only one I see buying mtgox may be coinlabs and thats a stretch

Its the users that have value,.
If you give them something they can believe in, a little cooling off period and some incentives to use the new exchange it might just work out.

It's one thing to halt trading until matters are sorted out.  People can still log in, get information, check balances, etc.  It's something completely different to just pull the plug without warning.  If it was the intention of MtGox to shutdown for a while before restarting they have done every single aspect of the process completely and utterly wrong.

Agreed. Either Karpeles have been already negotiating with the potential buyer for many months, the due-diligence is already finalized, etc. and during the shitstorm Karpeles made a very good offer (like 50% of what the company would be worth on the paper) to the buyer, or this doesn't make sense at all.

I have an account.  I would never use it again.  MtGox has tried the little carrot trick before by offering 0% fee trades for a few weeks.  What are they going to do now?  They would have to shower users with free bitcoins to get them to return, and even then anyone with any sense would say 'thanks' while withdrawing them.

On a more sinister note... how much do you think all that ID information for the verified users is worth?

When they locked BTC withdrawals for unverified users, I adamantly refused to verify because I'd rather lose the few BTC I had there than give them the ID info.  Went back and forth with support for weeks arguing that it couldn't possibly help prove I owned the account.  Suggested that for KYC, it should be sufficient to let me transfer ("gift") my BTC to another (verified) account if they needed to know where the BTC went.  Every response boiled down to please verify (i.e. send us a big pile of personal info)

how do you/we know that he didn't lie to the reporter?

We don't know. That's why I said, two times: Somebody inside MtGox wants us to believe it will be sold/acquired imminently.

They want us to believe that, what we don't know if it is true or not.

Thats why it is kinda amusing to assume there is not market for mtgox. Plenty of assholes both legal and otherwise would love all that info.

I am new to the scene but lost about $150 to Gox. My gut feeling is the "leaked" doc is legit, and the numbers are believable. The timing of the site going down and the fact it has been so long since the problem surfaced with no disclosure of details the whole time makes me think there are huge losses. If the parties who exploited the malleability issue found it was possible on a small scale, then they would have done a large amount in a short period of time. Then they continued it until discovered, which could have been a while considering what we know. Then the coins in cold storage would be almost the only BTC left to try to keep going with. Maybe even while the theft continued. I doubt there is a buyer. Gox is trying to get all of Bitcoin to fix Gox and I don't see that happening. I had just been thinking if trading has continued this long, they are going to make it and I was about to buy more Gox coins. Lucky this happened first. This actually may be best because it will likely lead to bankruptcy and Bitcoin price will recover more easily, and by the time the court helps divide what remains BTC price may increase such that Gox account holders net 50% or more of the value they had before the "crisis", even after sharing the losses of the theft due to poor security. To me that looks like best case.

OMG thats all absolute utter nonsense distraction....of course everything will be done, not to name the sellers of those 750000 BTC

which got stolen and sold after withdrawls were halted.....there is the smoking gun...the rest is BS and serves to transfer even more

money offshore as the accounts and records still haven´t been seized ! get real people ;)

Yeah what's the going rate for traincars full of lambs?

I had a horrific vision of Scientology and other cults bidding for Gox.  It makes sense to buy in terms of pure evil.

If Scientologists get involved its your fault for saying their name first  :-\

Haha, I don't live like that.  Everyone knows who the branded culty-vampires on Earth, are.

But yes your point is valid: Groups of traumatized humans like Goxxies are valuable to be harvested en masse.

You're stretching too far!

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSgIzaQbDm2r4GOjUexJi5_rrjpAGPND7HDJio8Z1rZ0-1_SAp-

There is an underground market for documents used by people who do identity theft... and the MtGox assets would be a gold mine for those kinds of characters... Identity theft has occurred with much less info available, and what MtGox has on file is high quality stuff...

Somebody will definitely want to buy the MtGox assets... and I'd be willing to bet, the vast majority of those interested, will end up being people we absolutely do not want having it.

=squeak=

I second the motion! "All in" for Bitcoin Jesus!!

The thing is that selling a company such as Gox is a process that takes months. You need a due diligence and the numbers have to be crystal clear.

Either Gox was already in advanced negotiations and the buyer already finalized its due diligence, etc. and now its getting a last-minute discount because or the current shitstorm, either all this is just BS and stall tactics.

Ergo, if you were Mark, would you move your office all the way across town, or only a block away? I'm just asking!