The lawyers are taking most of the money and the bankruptcy process is dragging itself along.
This is one reason why putting a Bitcoin related company into bankruptcy is probably not a good idea, especially if they have a decent amount of assets.
The Bitcoinica bankruptcy still hasn't concluded, and it went bankrupt way before Gox. It's getting complicated because the Bitcoinica liquidators are claiming Bitcoins from the Gox liquidators. They say Bitcoinica had Bitcoins stored on Gox.
So the 9th liquidators report is interesting.
Claims against Bitcoinica are: 91,300 BTC
$248,000 cash
$276,000 leveraged trading positions (hmm, I wonder if they are ignoring people with negative trading positions? Maybe not a big deal as they were probably 1/10th of this amount)
But the MtGox trustee values the claims at $6.8 million (USD)!
The bitcoins were only worth around $10 when Bitcoinica went bankrupt, so this claim is equal to all the cash ($524k) and roughly 6.3 million left over for 91k bitcoins - or $690/bitcoin.
If the liquidation ever goes through, it looks like the NZ liquidators will get a sizable amount of money.
This $690/bitcoin is also a major increase from the previously announced value of $483. So either they changed the Bitcoin valuation or Bitcoinica had a sizable number of bitcoins on the exchange that weren't subject to claims. Maybe this is best explained by the leveraged trading positions! As those trading positions should have been backed by purchases of bitcoins.
If you take $6.8 million, subtract the $250k cash. You have $6.55 million. Divide by $483 - and you get 135,600 BTC. So it is possible that the open positions were equal to 44,300 BTC long (and you have to remember that back then they were only worth $10 - so it wasn't as crazy as this would be now). That makes more sense than the liquidators changing their valuation of BTC. If they changed their valuation all the time based on market conditions, they'd never be able to liquidate.
