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.
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