Mark did not lie on the Gov form since the time in which the form was filled has to be taken into consideration, the form was filled at a time in which Bitcoin was free for government regulation, and Bitcoin was at phase 1, that is it was being ignored by Banks, and regulators, as such Mark did not like, later on 2013 the law changed, and it was applied retroactively (applying any law retroactively should be ilegal) and then about 5 million of US dollars were confiscated.
This is a witch hunt against exchanges, then an attack on CEO Bitstant Charlie Shrem on money laundering charge on 1 million USD with full force of the law was applied, when HSBC for several hundreds of Billions was not even touched.
I am almost sure certain Charlie is innocent and even though he has not been convicted on any crime, he was force to renounce to the Bitcoin Foundation, I think that attitude is wrong he should at the very least given the chance to prove himself in court for the charge he was accused.
In regards to Mark he is also victim on a witch hunt by the US government in regards the confiscation of the 5 million dollars.
However Mark has had bad business practices from much before the attack by the US government, one of the first cases I remember was when they first started mtgox was an anonymous exchanged, and then early on to be compliant with kyc laws and regulations without any warning to their customers they would not release funds if you need not identify with several documents process which was fairly slow, and only after identifying yourself the fund would be released, this happened sometime in 2012, a decent thing to do at the time would be for their anonymous client to opt get and withdraw their funds. Since that occasion I wondered what happened to the truly anonymous account that could not be identified. Did they have their funds confiscated ? probably.
Some people are asking for more regulation, when regulation is not the answer.
Most of Mtgox problems starting with the regulators, first the enforcement of kyc rules causing problems with withdraws, then Mutum Milleguium shutdown by government, then Dwolla got scared of government regulations and blocked all Bitcoin transactions, so clearly regulators have cause lots of problems and damage to the Bitcoin community.
Anyway Mtgox was good during the early years, it is time to move on, and use more credible exchanges, and a lesson to be learned never store your money at an exchange, I over the years have had losses do to exchanges, but I am now much more careful.
Let do not forget.
1. first bitcoin gets ignored. 2009-2010
2. then they laugh at Bitcoin. 2011-2012
3. Then they attack. 2013-2014 ?
4. then we win, at phase 4 expect to see Bitcoin over 10k, possibly by 2015.
going back to exchanges what we really need to do, is make Bitcoin more anonymous, do not press for more regulation, if Bitcoin is to play at a fair playing more laws are not needed, same laws that apply for Dollar should apply for Bitcoin, but we do not need laws that only apply for Bitcoin and not the Dollar, and we really need p2p exchanges, it should be simply to implement this among p2p currencies, it gets more complicated when introducing fiat.
And finally do not go against the spirit of Satoshi.
+1
