Why did it go up from $380 to a little over $500? There hasn't been any good news lately.

It's a thinly traded market. There's about $+-100 of noise just from daily trading.

Worse, since each buy has a matching sell, they count all orders as "fiat in".

If exchanges published a daily balance sheet of how much they had in each currency, we'd have useful data. Mt. Gox never did that, so it sort of became standard not to do that. (As it turns out, Mt. Gox didn't even have a daily balance sheet for their own internal use. Their internal accounting was so bad their own staff didn't notice money was being stolen. Probably because Karpeles wanted it that way.)

The bankruptcy trustee has announced there will be a creditors' meeting on July 23, 2014.  Probably in Tokyo. If you have a sizable amount owed you by Mt. Gox, you probably want to be represented there. That's the place where issues like "pay out Bitcoins or yen" get discussed.

That's three months away, allowing time for further investigation. I suspect more assets will turn up.

Fiatleak is an illusion. They don't have real data about currencies flowing into and out of exchanges.  They have only the trade data from exchanges, which most exchanges make available. If someone trades AUD and Bitcoin on an exchange, they show that as AUD being invested in Bitcoin. If the same AUD and Bitcoins are traded again, they show it, again, as AUD being invested in Bitcoin.

If someone makes a withdrawal from an exchange, they don't know about it. They show all trades as buying into Bitcoin. That's why Fiatleak is an illusion.

They have cool graphics, but the conclusion they draw from the data is bogus.

From the Sunlot proposal:

"Sunlot Holdings Limited is a special-purpose investment vehicle registered in Republic of Cyprus".

Not a good sign.

If we really want miners to make money with their mining rigs, the transaction fee has to be higher.

It's like any other commodity manufacturing industry with a fixed market size. Eventually prices stabilize just above cost.

The difficulty is probably still increasing rapidly because many of those "pre-orders" eventually get delivered. They may not be cost-effective by then, but the buyer, having paid for them, will probably plug them in and run them until the power cost overwhelms the return.

(I'm in Silicon Valley, where we have Hacker Dojo, a co-working space/club. A few months back, someone bought a membership, brought in a mining rig, and plugged it in, drawing a few kilowatts. Hacker Dojo put up with this until they discovered he was using about $500/month of power. (Membership is only $100 a month or so.) Then they refused to renew his membership and threw him out.)

It's probably that all those pre-ordered machines are finally being delivered, now that they're no longer cost-effective. See Butterfly Labs lawsuit.

Any exchange where that is the case is suspect. That is a big red flag for any broker, investment, or exchange. It's one of the classic indicators of a scam.

Remember all those bogus excuses from Mt. Gox.

Yes, that whole "buy Mt. Gox for 1BTC" thing seems sketchy.

With their scheme, they pay off some customers with some of the known assets, pay off other customers with future earnings if any, and get to keep any assets recovered once they're in charge. That's suspicious. Almost as if they know where some of the missing assets are.

It's better to let the bankruptcy trustee and the Tokyo police go to work. With full access to all Mt. Gox records, the block chain, and outside experts, they should be able to find out where the missing assets went. With a little more data, they'll probably have enough to arrest and interrogate Karepeles.

This just had to be an inside job.

I had only vague suspicions about Gox until the "hiatus in withdrawals" last June. That was a huge red flag. When a real brokerage does that, like Lehman did, they're out of business within hours. I've been posting that Gox was probably broke since July 4, 2013, when their two-week "hiatus" ended and full withdrawals didn't resume. 

The Wall Street Journal has an article today. Behind their paywall, though.

"By January, dozens of angry customers were calling Mt. Gox's offices in Tokyo each day. Employees not used to dealing directly with customers tried to pass the phones off to each other, according to people familiar with Mt. Gox.

One of the people said that for some of this time in early 2014, the CEO sat in his office watching anime or episodes of "Breaking Bad," and complained he was gaining weight."

Former Mt. Gox employees are talking to the press. Karpeles can't do a thing to them now, but the Tokyo cops can.

The main reason that the Tokyo cops didn't get involved earlier was that nobody was filing complaints. Remember all those shills telling users to be patient with Gox's delays in payment? (Reread "Mt Gox Withdrawal Delays starting from last April.) It looks like nobody sued Gox or reported them to any regulatory agency before the bankruptcy.

We're seeing action now. Gox asked for "civil rehabilitation", which usually takes about two weeks to get and would leave Karpeles in charge with payments stalled. But the Tokyo court didn't fall for that.  They send in a supervisor to check up on Gox. After six weeks, the supervisor reports back to the court, and the court fires Karpeles and calls in the cops to investigate.

With Karpeles fired, the remaining employees now report to the provisional administrator, and soon to the court-appointed trustee. They will be telling the investigators all the dirt on Karpeles and Mt. Gox to avoid being prosecuted themselves. The administrator is bringing in outside technical experts and auditors. The cash and Bitcoins went somewhere. With full access to bank records and Mt. Gox records, they'll soon know where.

Reuters has been digging up more info. They just interviewed Karpeles' mommy. Quotes:

"He didn't go to university. He failed badly in his second-last year of high school and decided to quit. I told him that if he was going to do that he should become a plumber, so he got an electrician's diploma. Then one day, I saw him walking around with a huge book, called "PHP". He told me he had become a doctor in PHP," a computer programming language.
...
"(Mark's) communication at a personal level is catastrophic. It's always been difficult to get him to speak. We tried to get him to be more extrovert ... Sometimes I wonder whether it's not some kind of trauma linked to my mother. I had the same problem when I was younger."
...
"I don't understand (the fraud accusations). I would never say it's unthinkable, but Mark is my son, and my job as a mother is to do what I can for my son. That said, if genuinely there was dishonesty, I will not cover for him."
...
Asked about Karpeles' own admission in a 2006 blog post that he had two computer fraud-related convictions before he was 21, she said: "No, no, I don't think there was ever any conviction. I don't know. There are maybe things he hid from me."

If you're in the US, you can report it to the US SEC, and copy the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. The more people who do this, the more attention the case will get.

They're somewhere. We'll probably find out where after enough evidence is obtained for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police to arrest and interrogate Karpeles.

For those who don't know this, police interrogations in Japan are much tougher than those in the US. They normally last 23 days.

We don't need millions of trades a second. Gox averaged about two trades a minute. Gox talked about their "new high-speed trading engine" in development, but that wasn't their problem at all.

No, liquidation should result in a payout. Now that Karpeles has been fired, he can't make it worse.

How do total sales of goods/services in Bitcoins compare to the number of new Bitcoins created, per month?

We don't need a "leading exchange". We need exchanges where all customers can get money and Bitcoins in and out with no delays and no nonsense. All exchanges where assets flow easily in and out will converge on price, because any difference will cause arbitrage transactions to pull them together.

Freeze, no. Alarm, maybe.

It might be useful to have a program watching the block chain and posting widely (Twitter, perhaps) when there's a transaction involving stolen coins. And sites which want to check the stolen coin list should be able to do so.