can we have a special moment of silence for MTGOX and my bitcoins that are lost forever
The liquidation of MtGOX is still going on, and you should eventually get something back, perhaps by the end of 2015. Maybe 20% of what you had.
The trustee appointed by the bankruptcy judge is still trying to collect the assets of the failed company, trying to decipher its accounting, and pondering how it will gather the claims of former clients. The latter should happen in May 2015. Then thee trustee will have until September 2015 to validate the claims, and then it should distribute the assets proportionally to the claims.
It is not clear what amount each former client will be able to claim as his loss. The account balances at the time of the collapse may be unusable, for several reasons, including the fact that the database that the trustee got has been found to be inconsistent. Also, it is not clear whether it is leaglly possible for the trustee to distribute the remaining 220'000 bitcoins as bitcoins; he may have to auction them, and distribute the yen instead.
It seems that the usual procedure in bankruptcies of this kind (e.g., in the Madoff ponzi) is to ignore the account balances provided by the company, and instead consider how much money each client deposited, minus how much he has withdrawn.
If the MtGOX trustee chooses (or is required by law) to use this method, then bitcoin deposits and withdrawals would be converted to yen according to the BTC price at the time of the deposit or withdrawal.
Obviously, the figure obtained by this method can be totally different from the client's final account balance. Unfortunately the victims do not seem to realize that this is the most important question they shoudl ask the trustee. Whether the refunds will be in BTC or JPY is irrelevant in comparison.
Clients would have to identify themselves in order to get refunds. It is not known how many former clients will give up and fail to file a claim. It is not known whether any of the accounts in the database are fake, with virtual balances, created only to get a slice of the bankruptcy refunds; or whether they belong to former management (which, by law, should not receive any proceeds from the liquidation). So it is impossibe to say how much each client will receive in the end.
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