Do you really believe gox has lost 740,000 BTC and has only 2,000 left?

[gambit1]

No, we couldn't get our money out. It fine you don't have sympathy; bitcoin is over as anything mainstream. Miners and hoarders from now on.

[1715174849]

1715174849

[MatTheCat]

If you have other theory, please reply

Yeah.

Loads of Bitcoin were stolen. Karpeles realised he was fucked and was going to get dragged through the mud. So he stole the rest before letting his exchange go under with everyone's Geld. 10K whale was Karpeles. Perhaps more of that fun to come.

[Miz4r]

No, we couldn't get our money out. It fine you don't have sympathy; bitcoin is over as anything mainstream. Miners and hoarders from now on.

Ofcourse not, Bitcoin will rise stronger from the ashes as it has always done. Soon enough these exchanges will no longer be the bottleneck that holds BTC back. You have seen absolutely nothing yet of the potential of cryptocurrencies, but you will in a few years from now. Growing pains like this are sadly unavoidable, as well as the victims it makes. Good risk management can help minimize the damage it will do to you though.

[eoJ]

I don't understand why any hacker/scammer would attack gox to death like this. Their stash of stolen coins are all of a sudden worth a whole lot less! It's like when ghash.io was nearing 50% hash rate and everyone started worrying what they would do. Of course theyy would not attack their own primary source of income! Why would anyone that makes money from Bitcoin sabotage the network like that!?

Because even at $100 a coin, 740k BTC is $74 million.

[JCviggen]

Thinking about it carefully I actually do think that they have lost everything. I don't know how exactly - probably via malleability hacks - but think about this:

A few weeks ago Mark Karpeles came out all guns blazing against Bitcoin, saying that some funds might have been lost due to malleability.

But he had been warned about malleability a long time ago.

If your company, holding hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin, had lost a few thousand Bitcoin via a trick you had been warned of, would you come out publicly like MK did, knowing there would be an immediate backlash and you would be ridiculed for not having fixed the problem despite warnings? I wouldn't - I would try to get the issue fixed quietly and take the loss.

But if you realised that everything was gone, then what?

At this point you would have to think "exit strategy". And so, to make it a case of force majeur from the outset, you make a bold public claim blaming Bitcoin, regardless of the fact that you know you will face ridicule. In this way you are starting off with a clear position - a position you will not go back on: that it was not your fault and that this is written into your terms and conditions. This is an important claim as it is your defence strategy for all future lawsuits brought against you by customers who have lost their funds.

It now seems obvious why MK would make such a strong public statement, very out of character and actually bordering on angry and panicked, several weeks ago.

He already knew then that everything was gone.

My opinion only but...

Shit.

It's obvious that something is very rotten in the land of Gox, but none of it adds up very well.


It's worth keeping in mind that Gox has had fiat liquidity issues since before last summer. Probably the root cause was the seizure of funds by the US government due to carelessness on the part of Gox. Once USD withdrawals were put on "temporary hiatus" a situation was created where Gox coins carried a significant premium price over other exchanges. Up until that point Gox had dominated the market to such an extent that most of the fiat coming into the BTC ecosystem went through them anyway.
Suddenly, that was no longer the case and because of the price premium it made no sense for any informed person to send fiat currency to Gox. You'd send it to Stamp or wherever. It's fair to say that fiat withdrawals were no more than a trickle since May, that's about 9 months now. Up to this point it makes sense.

BTC withdrawals were never an issue. The explanation that the cold wallets were drained by the hot wallets would imply there were no actual cold wallets, which is hard to believe and runs counter to many statements made in the past. Moving coins from cold wallets to hot wallets requires manual intervention. Even a bone headed idiot would figure out before long that he's trying to fill an apparently bottomless pit. Even more so when the problem at Gox was so clearly fiat related. People would transfer BTC to them because they wanted to cash out at a premium price. The imbalance would mean they have too many coins to cover with their (partially confiscated) cash reserves.

In such a situation it would make zero sense to anyone that the BTC hot wallets went down rapidly while they should be increasing. Certainly going down by the tune of hundreds of thousands is impossible to miss. So no, I don't believe that they could have lost that much over a lengthy amount of time as suggested by the document. No exchange can hemorrhage both coins and fiat at the same time unless their books are thinning equally quickly. I only believe it could be lost via gross incompetence (destroying the coins) or a huge amount in a very short time (would leave pretty clear evidence behind)

MK clearly has some issues himself, one of them apparently that he doesn't take blame for anything no matter what. Shoving the blame onto the BTC developers fits into his profile pretty well. Alternatively, it cannot be ignored that his statements and actions did manage to tank the exchange rate on his exchange to the point it became a farce. This is something that would make sense when you don't have nearly enough $$$ to cover all the chips in play: make them worth less. At the same time you attract some risk seeking capital looking to buy those cheap coins. Where this story stops making sense is the part where they are shutting down. If they had enough coins, there's nothing stopping them from re-opening limited withdrawals. Their coin/$ imbalance should have been massively reduced by now, and even a 10 BTC/day limit on withdrawals would probably keep people happy for quite a long time. It's difficult to believe they lost ALL of their coins. And in any case, why now? They've been fairly stable the past few days and I can't see what changed to force Mark's hand all of a sudden. If he was going to make a run for it, all the other stuff wasn't necessary, he could've just buggered off without all this nonsense and without leaving weird comments in the HTML.

Add to this that there appears to be massive insider trading going on. What happened yesterday at bitcoinbuilder in retrospect was more likely than not someone running from the only exit left because they knew what was coming. Worth pointing out however that anyone with fiat on Gox could buy coins, send them to builder and sell them for about the same price they bought them at Gox. So it was an effective way of getting out. I could guess things were closed down to put a stop to that, but merely closing internal transfers would've had the same effect.

So yeah, I dunno.

[pera]

lol

[Fiyasko]

"The cold storage has been wiped out due to a leak in the hot wallet."

BULLSHIT ALERT

Yeah, Wow, Nothing related to the "hot wallet" could have caused a "cold storage" wallet to malfunction in any way shape or form
He's running with the "cold storage" money

[zhangweiwu]

No.
Nobody is stupid enough to lose 750 000 BTC without noticing it.

Did you read that leaked document? I did. The document says they (knew) have leak for years and they could bankrupt any time, and they let it leak with the concern that MtGox drags down the bitcoin world with its fall - that is hubris.

Quote: "The reality is that MtGox can go bankrupt at any moment, and certainly deserves to as a company. "

There are some who point out MtGox would not say this, hence the document is fake. But they are known blatant.

[jl2012]

If you have other theory, please reply

Yeah.

Loads of Bitcoin were stolen. Karpeles realised he was fucked and was going to get dragged through the mud. So he stole the rest before letting his exchange go under with everyone's Geld. 10K whale was Karpeles. Perhaps more of that fun to come.

So this fits the last option: There are some criminal insider actions

[T.Stuart]

Add to this that there appears to be massive insider trading going on. What happened yesterday at bitcoinbuilder in retrospect was more likely than not someone running from the only exit left because they knew what was coming. Worth pointing out however that anyone with fiat on Gox could buy coins, send them to builder and sell them for about the same price they bought them at Gox. So it was an effective way of getting out. I could guess things were closed down to put a stop to that, but merely closing internal transfers would've had the same effect.

So yeah, I dunno.

Without doubt.

[nakaone]

"The cold storage has been wiped out due to a leak in the hot wallet."

BULLSHIT ALERT

Yeah, Wow, Nothing related to the "hot wallet" could have caused a "cold storage" wallet to malfunction in any way shape or form
He's running with the "cold storage" money

can some senior/ advanced member try to explain that?

i do not get how the cold wallet can be affected?

[Carra23]

What happened yesterday at bitcoinbuilder in retrospect was more likely than not someone running from the only exit left because they knew what was coming.

What happened at bitcoinbuilder? Missed that.

[boumalo]

No.
Nobody is stupid enough to lose 750 000 BTC without noticing it.

Did you read that leaked document? I did. The document says they (knew) have leak for years and they could bankrupt any time, and they let it leak with the concern that MtGox drags down the bitcoin world with its fall - that is hubris.

Quote: "The reality is that MtGox can go bankrupt at any moment, and certainly deserves to as a company. "

There are some who point out MtGox would not say this, hence the document is fake. But they are known blatant.

Why would they let it leak?? They didn't know how to avoid the leaks technically?

You would think they had the money to buy some good techs!

[mp420]

lol

That does not add up at all. Their trading fees from Apr 1 2013 to today were WAY more than $1.3 million. $13 million would be more believable.

Either these figures are fake or Gox has been scamming everyone and only 10% of trades have been real.

[T.Stuart]

What happened yesterday at bitcoinbuilder in retrospect was more likely than not someone running from the only exit left because they knew what was coming.

What happened at bitcoinbuilder? Missed that.

A few trades were going on around 0.33 real BTC per GOX BTC when suddenly dozens of sell orders jumped in at 0.19.

The first few hundred coins were snapped up but then there were no more bids left; 5000 coins just sat there on offer at 0.19 for a minute or two getting nibbled before some whale logged in and snapped them up!

Then some more thousands got bought.

For the rest of the day 100-coin sells up a lot of the time every .05 from about .29 up to .4.

[JCviggen]

What happened yesterday at bitcoinbuilder in retrospect was more likely than not someone running from the only exit left because they knew what was coming.

What happened at bitcoinbuilder? Missed that.

Out of nowhere someone dumped ~10K Goxcoins. We were at .35-.40 and dumping went straight for .19
For a place that had 5-6K volume per 24h it was fairly spectacular.

But, anyone who had fiat on Gox could perfectly get it out this way. The first ones to try it would even have made a profit. So it was always something that would get arb'd once the word got out. Guess we'll never know.

[zhangweiwu]

Why would they let it leak?? They didn't know how to avoid the leaks technically?

Ture, they don't know how to avoid the leaks, technically.

You would think they had the money to buy some good techs!

They have, but solving this requires the level of core bitcoin devs, any of these may disclose the current financial status. You can have a trusted guy and a proficient one, but not both. The trusted guys talked with the proficient ones many times to try to solve it without revealing too much details. I am too bad at remembering western names to give you google keywords, but this fact was discussed here before.

[zhangweiwu]

That does not add up at all. Their trading fees from Apr 1 2013 to today were WAY more than $1.3 million. $13 million would be more believable.

Either these figures are fake or Gox has been scamming everyone and only 10% of trades have been real.

When you say $1.3m, do you mean the number in first row, first column? That was the year 2012. 2013-2014 is on the second column, totalling $10m.

[zedicus]

So they are going to change their name to Gox and get a new CEO and add litecoin and re-openup .. with captial controls? haha My god, what kind of shinanigans st hooplah am i reading..

http://www.scribd.com/doc/209050732/MtGox-Situation-Crisis-Strategy-Draft

[wobber]

So they are going to change their name to Gox and get a new CEO and add litecoin and re-openup .. with captial controls? haha My god, what kind of shinanigans st hooplah am i reading..

http://www.scribd.com/doc/209050732/MtGox-Situation-Crisis-Strategy-Draft

Who the hell wrote that?

Part 2: switch off exchange temporarely (1month) --???

What? It's been 12 hours and people are freaking out already.