An idea I have for recovering money for Cryptsy customers without relying on Paul Vernon or Cryptsy is as follows:
1) Have a trusted user of Bitcointalk.org set up a bitcoin address and he/she holds the private key.
2) Advertise this address as a place to send bitcoins to go to Cryptsy customers that lost money.
3) Anyone can send bitcoins to this address anonymously such as the "hacker", Paul Vernon, Satoshi Nakamoto, or anyone else that is wealthy and wants to help a brother out.
4) After a period of time (a year maybe), all bitcoins collected are divided among those that can prove they lost money on Cryptsy and it will be divided based on how much they lost. For example: if customer A lost 1% of the stolen bitcoins, he gets 1% of the bitcoins collected in this address.
What do you guys think? Two potential negatives to this idea are a) can we really trust someone to hold that money if any gets collected, and b) if someone is just being generous and decides to donate some bitcoins, there are those that may think he is the hacker and try to go after him. We would have to make it clear that anyone that donates will not be tracked down.
#4 is impossible without Cryptsy customer database.
Also there is no incentive whatsoever for the "hacker" to send anything to it, so you would end up with some dust donations at best.
You are correct that someone from Cryptsy would need to be involved. I know you are laughing, but they don't have to have access to the money. Someone from Cryptsy (like Cryptsy_Jim) knows what accounts show a balance and how much it is. He can take a support ticket from each of those customers with their bitcoin address and provide that list to a rep from Bitcointalk.org.
You're also right that there is no incentive for the hacker to send anything. But we also know that the hacker hasn't moved the money for the last 2 years. If he's nervous about being discovered, he could send it back to take the heat off. This is just an idea, and maybe not a great one, but what other options do we have?
