Yeah, exactly. The bitcoins in particular are pretty illiquid from the point of view of paying employees and rent, too. But my basic point was that even if they aren't making a clear loss, they certainly aren't rolling in money, and there is a very real possibility of making a loss month-to-month, which someone would have to cover. I'd bet that someone is a private investor, or a few. And I'd be willing to bet that bitcoinica is in a similar situation.

5 million yen monthly operating costs = $60k a month to operate. Their yearly revenue was $337k. Yes, they also have coins, but they can't sell them easily.

All I have is this (rather informal) report they released a month or so ago: https://mtgox.com/press_release_20120201.html

What? he doesn't need to reimburse lost profits out of pocket. If I lent you $10 and someone mugs you and steals those $10, you still owe me $10, and you don't have $10, but I wouldn't say you lost $20.

Either way, I think it's very shaky reasoning to assume that just because he can afford to cover 43k lost customer coins, that he made that much in profit, and is thus trading against his customers.

Regarding his incorporation, he's said he'll announce details about it soon. I still believe that there's probably at least one fairly large investor behind all of this.

I obviously have no more of an answer than you do, but are you aware that MtGox is running at a loss? This is probably because they have external private investors who are willing to foot the bill, making short-term losses in exchange for the promise of market supremacy when/if things take off.

The same is probably true of bitcoinica. I don't know who has invested in it, but zhoutong has made references to speaking to investors at various points, so it doesn't seem unlikely that wealthy backers would just decide to cover the cost in exchange for a larger stake in one of the most successful bitcoin ventures yet. The loss may have wiped out bitcoinica's profit, but I wouldn't necessarily assume that just just because they are willing to cover their losses out of pocket that they necessarily made all that money through their own business activities.

Another consideration is that large purchases of bitcoins (such as a wealthy external investor covering bitcoinica's losses) won't necessarily happen on mtgox or anywhere observable to us. I know of several large over-the-counter transactions that occur regularly.

He lacks tact but I wouldn't call him an asshole (in that exchange or others).

Should the option in your profile to do this by default by on by default?

Sorry, I thought it said socalist, and I was like, "like, I am so totally a socalist" so I picked that one.

Well, then you get competition I'm all for him doing it.

Thanks for putting this out there. Speaking of astana, he's back: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=67670.msg787933#msg787933

Oh, I didn't mean to suggest you'd done anything wrong. I just wanted people to lay off the insults/name-calling until we figured out more information. I appreciate your behavior in all of this.

It is a known risk but either way, if you implement something like daily settlement with a margin account, the potential losses from one of the counterparties getting cold feet are much more limited.

I meant more in terms of determining things about shakaru by re-examining how the astana business went down, in light of what we know now about shakaru. I found it a lot easier to side with shakaru before it turned out he owed >8500 btc to half the community and was avoiding questions about the whole deal until recently. You can only get screwed/scammed so much before one starts wondering if there's an underlying cause.

I have no doubt that astana is hot-headed and is making himself no friends by posting so desperately on this thread. However, if we can look past the confrontational attitude and distorted view of how things work around here, I think there could be some interesting information to be gathered. If he really was a scammer that scammed shakaru out of loads of money, what would be the advantage in creating a new account and then linking it to his old identity? He can scam way more people by not picking up the shit reputation he'd already developed.

The way I see it (and from what he said on IRC between fights with random people), he's hot-headed and even admits to being a bit crazy. But I don't think it's entirely unlikely that there was a massive misunderstanding (to put it diplomatically) that led to the astana/shakaru fiasco we all know so well at this point. Astana has nothing to gain, as a scammer, by trying to clear his name, at this point. Even if he could somehow prove shakaru to be 100% in the wrong, he'd still have a shit reputation around here for being hot-headed. On the other hand, his obvious impulsiveness also means that he's less likely to be plotting devious and nefarious deals to scam more people, and if this was just a ploy to "get back" at shakaru, it isn't working very well, given his current approach.

So as I said, I think we should give him a chance to explain his side of what happened, and do our best not to call him a thief, scammer, or whatever else people seem to enjoy calling him to set him off here and on IRC. The benefit of doing this is that, assuming he's not lying, the whole debacle would have been extremely unpleasant for him, so it's just a nice thing to do. But even for purely utilitarian reasons, he does have potentially interesting information on shakaru, which is important now that so many people are starting to doubt his actions were in good faith. So if you want to view not pissing astana off (given his obvious uncontrollable temper) as a way to step through the threats/cockiness and get to the interesting stuff, you can also do that.

Either way, I think there's something to be learned here. I know that several people on IRC have mentioned re-examining the astana/shakaru deal over the past few months, so it could be helpful to finally get as much as possible from the other side of the story.

I think the question is legitimate, given shakaru's recent problems.

Can you comment on how your new venture (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=67352.0) is related to this effort and the interests of the people you owe? I spoke to smickles and he said that you had another loan with him, which you have since paid back, but that you also still owed him money.

As a mostly disinterested observer, this whole thing seems risky, and makes me uncomfortable on the behalf of your creditors.

As far as I can tell, no. This means that you can sell options that you've bought from MPOE at prices other than the ones he's willing to buy them back for, and other people can buy yours at your price instead of his. Since he seems to give an infinite supply of options at his price, though, you don't have much flexibility in pricing

In other news, I've been hit by a car zero times, since 1984

But I don't doubt that MPOE security is good, since it involves manual confirmation of transactions and no wallets hosted on hosted boxes.

Here, I'll cite my comment on reddit:

Backups are not really the issue here.

I assume you mean "preferably with no interest"?