Bitcoin Forum

Here is how I see the events
1. Mtgox has problems in US and a little over 5M USD are seized. So, their USD cash flow is seriously impaired. They need USD but how to obtain them?

2. USD withdraws are stopped or seriously delayed (in some cases months) and as  result the price is conveniently $100 more from every other exchange. IF they wanted they can easily do insider arbitrage and profit $100 from every bitcoin they sell to the people with locked in funds. So they can quickly make up for the seized funds and more. They might have sold some of the bitcoins they hold for customers too though. Effectively making them in fractional reserve institution.

3. Bitcoin price jumps 10 times, but they have already sold some of their customers bitcoins to make up for the lost money and now they don't have enough to pay everyone that wants to withdraw bitcoins. So they need bitcoins. What do they do?

4. They stop the bitcoin withdraws and that way force some people to sell their bitcoins for 6 time less. So they can easily re-buy the needed bitcoins on the cheap.

So, in short, when they need USD, they stop the withdraws and sell bitcoins more expensive. When they needs bitcoins, they stop bitcoin withdraws and re-buy them at a bargain. 
Do it couple times and you are billionaire.

Of course, that's only speculation on my part. I don't have idea what really happened behind the scenes. It's just a theory.


What matters for me is that, for SECOND time it's their fault that bitcoin is crashing. I say it's time to go. They did great job and at helping bitcoin become more mainstream, but the walk should be over now.

they lost millions to the coinlab disaster. which was silly. you don't drop that kinda money w/o checking the laws.

karpeles may know how to code, but he's not a lawyer, economist, or businessman.

i'm not saying you have to be all those things to run a business, but if you aren't at least knowledgeable in some of those areas, you need to get people who are -


which he wasn't smart enough to do.


in short, i don't think mark has a smart plan - no matter what he's up to. 

According to the recent market situation and looking at all the exchanges everything is possible CryptoPanda is some how true in some facts,
Gox needed to came out of this things so they might have done this to make money / bitcoin to get out of all this,
Latter we can se if everything will be fine and works correctly then this theory will be some how proved.

ok the last days the rumours about something odd with their prices really increased
there is insider trading or something going on

withdrawals with the TXID were seen in the block chain meaning it should be possible to withdraw soon. So people started buying the cheap coins. Thus price increased. Pretty simple if you read between the lines.

Mark has to pay

Daniel Negreanu Goes Apeshit On Mt Gox (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ_QLpfXoUM)

My back-of the envelope calculations say that Gox shoud by now have replaced all that was lost in the seizures with the trading fees, even allowing for wages and operating / legal costs.

The recent debacle and all the PR disaster / legal fuckups might have pushed them back underwater, but probably not by more than a few million USD.

I'm almost certain the halting of USD withdrawals was due to legal reasons. I'm also almost certain the halting of BTC withdrawals was due to technical reasons (read: incompetence). It's very telling how Stamp and BTC-E implemented quick fixes in a few hours and it's taking weeks for Gox to do the same. Now, of course, all the lawsuits etc might have caused them to just wait for the authorities to step in and try to grab as much trading fees as they can in the meantime.

there are also news about artificial floor of the price

There are lots of theories about dodgy trading, but I just can't see Mark doing or pulling this off. I think he just ran a really incompetent business and also got fucked by other restrictions and laws etc.

Regarding the floor there are also, and this is for certain, a sizeable number of speculators who have been transferring money into Gox by whatever means, fast or slow, they can, wanting to buy cheap coins. I think this week is when most of that money will be processed.

at this point it really seems like this was the case