Bitcoin Forum

http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/2014/02/26/irc-chat-with-mark-karpeles-confirms-leaked-documents-authenticity-mt-gox-currently-seeking-bail-out/

So .. 750,000 coins actually are "missing" from Gox.  Hoe lee sheet.

when I see "technically unavailable" I think "dropped the cold storage wallet in a fish tank"

this is either very complex fraud or very simple technical stupidity, or both.

edit: damn both, according to the strategy document (http://www.scribd.com/doc/209050732/MtGox-Situation-Crisis-Strategy-Draft)

It all seems so shady. Magicaltux aint that dumb. Why is he playing dumb now?

Dude probably got all the coins himself... richest bitcoiner after Satoshi.  :D

Hard to imagine someone buying Gox when it has that much outstanding liability.  I don't see any other option besides bankruptcy and goxcoin/goxbucks owners taking it in the pants.

"more or less"

"not from within"

So, tell me, where do you see confirmation on that piece of information?

I purchase afew, don't mind taking the risk.

always as a HIGH RISK Asset

Some people find it hard to imagine buying a yacht.

Some people find it hard to imagine buying a bottle of £40 wine.

Some people find it hard to imagine getting a taxi, when the bus is cheaper.


Its all relative.

The part where it says, in bold, on the first slide ..

"At this point 744,408 BTC are missing due to malleability-related theft which went unnoticed for several years."

Doesn't matter if my cat wrote it.  If the guy running the company says the document is "more or less" accurate, I'll take that as confirmation that the gist of the document is correct, including shit that is bolded on page 1.  If that's not good enough for you, no skin off my back.  We'll see soon enough.

No confirmation, but I am starting to wonder if Mark didn't spill his coffee on the cold storage hard drive.

you've seen http://www.scribd.com/doc/209050732/MtGox-Situation-Crisis-Strategy-Draft yes?
+snap on the comment lol

Sounds deflationary. The M1 of bitcoin just went down by 750,000 BTC (6%), no?

If they have never been sold and never will be, then sure.

no, and not just, all of those coins could be in circulation and have past through many hands, we all may own some of them, if just means gox doesn't have btc to give some people (lot's of people) if that figure is correct.

just how the hell they couldn't notice that there wallet(s) and account balance(s) were out by 750,000 for several years is beyond me though.. or just how we are expected to believe that more than 750,000 was still held on gox after all their stupidity the recent years..

this really does not add up.

erm we just went to do a withdraw and the wallet is empty.. okay how much is out? ... 750,000 <--- does not happen, unnoticed.

Apparently 750,000 BTC that people thought they had doesn't exist.

Well, yeah, that's why I said M1, not M0 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply).

When banks failed during the great depression, the value of the dollar went up, not down, right?

Exactly... 750,000 just keeps shrinking month after month and never once they did a db query to determine what they owe users in btc versus actual btc in their possession? The simplest audit imagineable? Something so simple it is coded into open source mining pool software let alone an exchange?

And this was not even a hack like we all think of it. The hot wallet being drained. That i can understand. But a multi month/year hack that some idiot keeps topping off the hot wallet letting it happen repeatedly until almost everything is gone? With no simple audit once a day or even a month?

"Where's that money, you silly stupid old fool? Where's that money? Do you realize what this means? It means bankruptcy and scandal and prison! That's what it means! One of us is going to jail; well, it's not gonna be me!"

The only question on my mind is: how long before Karpeles is in jail for insolvent trading/fraudulent conduct/gross negligence?

That'd be my second question, with the first one being "Is it really true that 750,000 BTC just disappeared?"

I find it rather hard to believe. That said, I never did trust Mt. Gox.

I don't understand how people could have withdrawn bitcoins, used transaction malleability to make gox think there was an error and resend the coins... to the tune of 750,000 BTC without mtgox noticing something was wrong... am I missing something? or is the loss related to something else?

Screams out "inside job" if that's really what happened. If that's what happened, someone had to have been on the inside cooking the books. (There have to have been books of some sort, right?)

Crazy Rabbit's theory is that they never had the 700k in coins to start with.  Gox may have been selling non-existent coins all along as the transactions were off blockchain.

Gox thought they were making money but actually due to malleability issue, they were getting continually drained of real bitcoins.

So the liability side to customers kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger.  

I would say that Karpeles is a genius retard... IMHO of course.

That does not compute. You query the btc balance of every user. Check.
You then check you hot wallet balance in bitcoind. Check.
You then check your cold wallet money has not moved. You still control it. Check.
Do the simple math.

Gross incompetence on a scale which goes magnitudes beyond what MtGox's harshest critics could ever possibly imagine.

I mean in accounting the absolute most basic reconciliation is to balance the chart of account against the actual funds.  The books say we should have x BTC and we check and yup we have x BTC.  The books say we should have y USD and yup we have y USD.  This isn't to say accounting should end there but this is the absolute most basic check and for the story to be believed they simply never did it for years.

Not to mention community out-cry for a confirmation that this most basic level of accounting was done, also for years.  How many extra-large cups of chocolate-caramel-topped heavy-creamer does a guy need to suck down before things like this stop being a concern?

My other question will the bitcoin devs face a lawsuit eventually for knowing about the transaction malleability issue and not making a serious effort to address it?

Nope. Open source software uses a license that covers them from pretty much everything.

What you say is correct.  I don't think MtGox was able to query btc balance of every user.
The hot wallet would've been running low.  I don't know if it was topped up and how many times.
I think cold wallet is still somewhere but most likely has been shifted for "security reasons". 
MtGox was unable to do the maths, it would appear.  :(

Misleading headline.

When asked if the plan was legit, Karpeles' reply was "more or less … this document was not produced by MtGox".

I think "more or less [legitimate]" easily encompasses "yes, most of it is true, except the numbers were grossly exaggerated".  At this point I don't think he can comment on anything numbers-related, even to point out that they are the part of the document that is "less" legit.

Probably because he's under subpoena and very likely to be extradited.

If they exist (which I doubt) they've either already been sold or else won't be sold for several years.  Both scenarios are deflationary.

But honestly the only way this 750k number can be real is if they were fractional reserving and that was their phony ledger entry backed by only 75,000 coins.  That's deflationary too, though only because of the widespread perception that goxcoins were real.

Oh for crying out loud ..

[10:58] <JonWickedFire> Is that Crisis Strategy Draft even legit?
[11:04] <MagicalTux> more or less
[11:05] <MagicalTux> as the name suggests it’s a draft, and it’s a bunch of proposals to deal with the issue at hand, not things that are actually planned and/or done
[11:06] <MagicalTux> this said this document was not produced by MtGox

He's obviously seen it before and it was written by some sort of crisis mitigation team.  That team didn't just pull numbers out of their asses.  They based it on some information provided by Gox so they had something to work with.  Notice how in the crisis slides, this is bolded: "At this point 744,408 BTC are missing due to malleability-related theft which went unnoticed for several years.".  So you're telling me he reads this thing, sees the bolded 744,408 BTC and doesn't mention to the media that the big, glaring, scary figure in bold is wrong?  Hogwash.

Like Madoff or Enron, both of which probably had much more scrutiny than Mt. Gox. It's certainly possible.

Fractional reserving, "borrowing" the funds, hoping to pay them back off the rise in $/BTC, and then when $/BTC falls 50% and doesn't come back, and you're about to get caught, try to blame the losses on transaction malleability. Also possible.

Hopefully there will be an honest investigation and one day we'll know what happened, and how it happened, and who is responsible.

True. But we know Mr Karpeles is always very evasive. Even when he could say something not damaging to himself and his company, he'd rather say nothing, at least it seems.

I mean, really.. 750k coins? There were that many HODLERS on gox?

Lets say 700k of the theft occured when bitcoin was <$10. This is probably how it did go down.

How will that work out? I'm trying to think it out and it seems like regardless of the point in time the theft took place, its still valued at 300m USD now, is that correct? So how on earth did they remain operational at all from 2013 onwards??? Hard to wrap my head around it...

If Gox's accounting book included fake coins (goxcoins) then they could potentially continue to see that their amount of bitcoins is continually increasing (via the books and thus look like they are making money) while their actual amount of real bitcoins is declining (but not able to see this via the accounting books so that less people know about gox being a fractional BTC reserve). The whole problem about having to continually having to manually refill the hot wallet from the cold wallet could easily be explained if they actually don't have a cold wallet, rather just a few hot wallets that are all linked and auto-refill the main hot wallet when the hot wallet becomes low.

hard to believe.

Lessee (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox)...

"On 22 February 2013, following an introduction of new anti-money laundering requirements by Dwolla, some Dwolla accounts became temporarily restricted." "The funds were finally returned on May 3, more than 3 months later". (And following a 400% or more increase in the $/BTC exchange rate.)

"Mt. Gox suspended trading on 11 April 2013 until 12 April 2013 2am UTC for a 'market cooldown'."

"Mt. Gox suspended withdrawals in US dollars on June 20, 2013. On July 4, 2013, Mt. Gox announced that it had 'fully resumed' withdrawals, but as of September 5, 2013, few US dollar withdrawals had been successfully completed."

"On August 5, 2013, Mt. Gox announced that they have incurred 'significant losses' due to crediting deposits which had not fully cleared. Mt. Gox announced that new deposits would no longer be credited until the funds transfer to Mt. Gox is fully completed."

"Wired Magazine reported in November 2013 that customers were experiencing delays of weeks to months in withdrawing funds from their accounts."

---

I have a hard time feeling any sympathy for anyone who made significant deposits to Mt. Gox after February 2013.

I think the reduction of liabilities is why he's driven the price down to 130 on his exchange.

When they liquidate they can settle the number of BITCOINS against that 130 price in each account and tell people here you are funds are back ie 6btcx 130 gox price at shut down = 700ish usd.

No btcs again.

And he had he balls to blame bitcoin.

I hope he gets the shit beaten out of him for deception.

He gave a three-word reply.  Not even a grammatically complete sentence.

So he didn't mention it.  He barely mentioned anything.

Karpeles has a lot of bitcoins. He is an early adopter and he was running one of the biggest exchanges. He must have more than 100k btc for himself in cold storage which was not related with mtgox. He is not an idiot he is told to pretend it. For sure a lot of bitcoins may have been lost but the problem here is the trust. If mtgox enable bitcoin withdrawals and the 550k costomers or a portion of them loose trust and try to sell their bitcoins then the price will go down down down... So the best strategy for him and for big investors is to claim that all btc had been lost if the majority eat that manipulation. The "leaked" document and the irc conversion is for testing reactions.

Pure manipulation...

I still think that there is something much bigger going on, and they made up this story to cover what is really happening

Facebook paid 1 Billion for Instagram, so 500'000'000 for Gox would be nice, with 1 Billion sure all could get their Coins back

From the interview I read between Mark and Jon Fisher, it seems apparently clear that Mark is operating from a state of denial.  All the speculation that there has been regarding Gox over the years, I had dismissed 99% of it as garbage. But in this case, I now fully expect much of it to found out as true.

I think Mark has committed gross criminal activities. And I think he will be indicted for them. I do not necessarily think that Mark is a criminal mastermind, instead I think his criminal actions, if he took them, were driven by hubris, panic, and denial of severity.

Throwing around terms like "gross criminal activities" when you have no idea what's going on is like pointing your finger and yelling witch. It's all fun and games until some random person points to you.

True. But I am speculating. If Mark took peoples deposits and allowed trading while knowingly being insolvent he broke the law in a very big way. If Mark in any way robbed Peter to pay Paul or traded from his exchange to another to try and raise capital, he broke the law.  Maybe he didn't. But I would not bet on it.

Yep.  Either Mark traded whilst insolvent or MTGox's cold storage will pop up somewhere.

This is a English learner's question: Why he said "Gox Crisis Management Plan Confirmed Legitimate" instead of "Gox Crisis Management Plan Confirmed genuine" or "Gox Crisis Management Plan Confirmed authentic"? Am I right that this is a mis-use of "Legitimate"?

I believe he used the word legitimate in the sense that it was not a fake document written by the releaser of the document, twobitidiot or some other person.

If I had that many bitcoins under my control I would be checking the balance daily, just to remind me how rich I was. ;)

Bullshit did he not know what was going on. Utter bullshit.

All of the lost coins, around 770k. To give you an idea how rich you are, at the price of 600USD, Chuck Lorre (creator of "Big Ban Theory" telenovela)'s net worth is 600million by 2011, that equals to 1000k bitcoins. This is to remind you that there are a lot of people who can afford losing this much money - a lot can afford to bid MtGox but as I posted previously, only a few people has existing reputation in Bitcoin history whom if assigned CEO can save the business.