Right. We have to keep explaining this to n00bs. Fiatleak has no info about actual money flows. All it sees is trading within exchanges. Fiatleak can't see deposits or withdrawals, because they don't have access to the exchange's balance sheet. If it's the same money going round and round, Fiatleak reports it as an inbound flow. That's just wrong.

(Then there's Mt. Gox, which doesn't seem to have had a balance sheet, or any kind of accounting system to detect missing assets.)

The fee for transactions is not determined by the client. It's determined by miners. If miners want to charge more, they can. Other miners can undercut them, but now that a few big mining pools have most of the hash capacity, it's in their interest to crank up the fees. If you want fast confirmations (or, during busy periods, any confirmations) it's going to cost you.

Cutting the default fee in the Bitcoin client was probably a mistake. That cut the fees paid to miners. They didn't have to put up with that, and it looks like they're pushing back.

If you put a fee of 1% of the transaction cost on a transaction, does it get confirmed quickly?

Gox was never a bank, even a fake one. They didn't lend or invest money. They just stole it.

On the scale on which Apple operates, Bitcoin is down in the noise.

So withdraw all your money and Bitcoins and see if they pay up.

The main reason that neither law enforcement nor courts did anything about Mt. Gox until very recently was that nobody asked them to do anything. Nobody sued Mt. Gox when they stopped US dollar withdrawals last June. Nobody tried to put them into involuntary bankruptcy in Japan when they weren't paying their bills. Even when Mt. Gox filed for "civil rehabilitation", Mt. Gox was getting what they wanted until, finally, in mid-March, the guy behind "mtgoxrecovery.com" filed a petition with the Tokyo District Court alleging fraud and demonstrating that at least some of Mt. Gox's claims were false.

Then, suddenly, things stopped going Mt. Gox's way. The plan for quick entry to "civil rehabilitation", with creditors stalled and Karpeles still in charge of Mt. Gox, got postponed a month by the Tokyo court pending investigation. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police became involved.  Word of this made it to the US courts, and a US bankruptcy judge told Karpeles to show up in Dallas or not get US bankruptcy protection. (Since another US suit names Karpeles personally, losing bankruptcy protection is a big deal for him.)

Courts don't do anything until someone files suit. Then things happen.

The hash rate hasn't jumped recently. On a log scale, it's been a straight line since the beginning of 2013, when ASICs started coming on line.

With real brokers, Know Your Customer issues are dealt with when you open the account. There's something wrong with an "exchange" that brings that up as an issue only when you make a withdrawal.

I've pointed this out before, about Mt. Gox. At Mt. Gox, all their issues were somehow always on the withdrawal side. Never on the deposit side. That was a red flag from June of 2013. There were lots of people (shills?) saying it was "US government Intervention" or some kind of US bank conspiracy. It wasn't. Mt. Gox was broke.

This is going to be very funny. Look at the credits in IMDB. Many of the guys behind failed exchanges are in there: Mark Karpeles, Roger Ver, and Jared Kenna.

I wonder how many people in the movie are associated with Bitcoin exchanges that have failed since the movie was made.

Mt. Gox hasn't been granted bankruptcy protection in either the US or Japan. They've only asked for it. In both cases, courts are considering their petition, and may reject it. Once a creditor (the guy behind "mtgoxrecovery.com") filed a petition in the Tokyo District Court alleging fraud at Mt. Gox, the Japan bankruptcy stopped going the way Mt. Gox wanted. The Tokyo District Court delayed the bankruptcy decision for six weeks while the court-appointed supervisor and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police investigate.  Mt. Gox wanted "civil rehabilitation" in Japan on their terms. That's not available when there's fraud, or when there's little hope of paying creditors back 100%. Most likely, Mt. Gox will be forced into one of the tougher forms of bankruptcy in Japan, all of which start with Mark Karpeles being fired.

With a lot of creditors in the US, probably more than in Japan, the US case is important. The US doesn't have to give them debtor-in-possession treatment. Especially if fraud is suspected. The US judge can put in a trustee, to oversee any US assets and deal with the court in Japan. Read "When the Bankruptcy Trustee Suspects Fraud". The trustee can file lawsuits against any related party (like Mark Karpeles) and ask for criminal prosecutions.

This is the position Mt. Gox is in: they're trying to convince judges that somehow, half a billion dollars entrusted to them are missing, they don't know where it went, but it's not their fault. That's not likely to convince any judge.  Especially with petitions on the record demonstrating that it's probably false.

There were a lot of people on here who were saying "just give Gox more time" after they stopped US dollar withdrawals last June. Remember the "two week hiatus on withdrawals" that never ended? Mt. Gox customers were far too patient. I was telling people to get out as soon as the "hiatus on withdrawals" started. If a real brokerage did that, they'd be out of business within hours. That's what happened to Lehman.

In the Tokyo bankruptcy court, as soon as a creditor of Mt. Gox actually showed up with a lawyer and filed a petition alleging fraud, things started happening fast. Nobody had been filing complaints against Mt. Gox with the courts and cops in Japan. That's why nothing happened.

What's happening is that the courts are calling them on their shit. The guy behind "mtgoxrecovery.com" filed a petition with the Tokyo bankruptcy court alleging fraud. A professor at ETH Zurich who showed that "transaction malleability" could not possibly account for losses of the size indicated, and that info was provided to the court. The Tokyo judge then extended the examination for another month, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police are now involved.

Meanwhile, the bankruptcy judge in the US, where Mt. Gox also filed for  bankruptcy, says Karpeles has to show up in person or Mt. Gox doesn't get bankruptcy protection in the US. Which means the US suits go forward. One of which is against Karpeles personally.

Oh, and some ex-Mt. Gox employees talked to Reuters about what's going on. They're also talking to the Tokyo cops.

Things are moving forward, and not in the direction that Karpeles wanted.

Transaction volume is about the same as it was a year ago. The number of transactions has been around 65,000/day for the last year. Right now, it's almost exactly where it was a year ago.

The use of Bitcoin is not increasing.

The whole China runup was because buying Bitcoins with yuan was a cheap, easy, and legal way around China's exchange controls.  The PBOC took away "legal" a while back, and is now clamping down on "easy". "Cheap" will disappear along with those two.

That's symmetry for you.  Bitcoin is a zero-sum game. There have to be a lot of losers.

Whether you agree with that tends to depend on whether you got in on the ground floor of this one.

He may not be going to the US, but the judge made it clear that if he doesn't, Mt. Gox doesn't get bankruptcy protection in the US. That means US-based lawsuits can proceed.

If he does go to the US, the FBI and the SEC will probably want to talk to him.

His big troubles are in Japan. The "mtgoxrecovery.com" people filed a statement alleging fraud with the Tokyo District Court handling the bankruptcy. That derailed the schedule for the bankruptcy. Mt. Gox probably won't get "civil rehabilitation" - they'll get one of the harsher forms of bankruptcy in Japan. One that kicks Karpeles out and puts a trustee in.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Police are still investigating, and now some ex-Mt. Gox employees are talking.  The Mt. Gox coverup is coming apart.

Right. Despite much denial on this forum, Bitcoin in China is dead.

It's basically the same tax treatment gold gets. What's the problem?