Even if TM was the cause of those 750k vanishing, there is no way this was done without anyone noticing it. It would be them stealing their own coins and blame it on TM after.
Also we are to believe that they had no personal data of supposed thief when they were asking an arm and a leg for someone to withdraw large funds.
Furthermore, if they REALLY did not notice because they are so extremely incompetent, then why all this secrecy, instead of providing us with all the information/data required to check for ourselves?
Cold wallets, thief ID (probably stolen).
It just does not add once again, why we are left in the dark if TM really was the reason, or anything else was the reason for the theft.
A liar will try to release as little information as possible, because if he releases information, someone could verify it and possibly detect the lie.
There is either some government involvement possibly blackmailing him or his family,
OR he screwed up badly in trying to trade the BTC in an attempt to pay off liabilities for court cases/licenses etc with customer funds, he believed he would be able to get back easily with fees/arbitrage between exchanges and other ways to abuse exchange powers.
He then got surprised by BTC shooting up to 1200 when he already sold out all the BTC, resulting in him having to retreat into illegal activity in a desperate attempt to regain the funds which would explain why he keeps silent about it.
What we do know is that 160k passed through the MtGox API just recently, which unless there is some other mysterious explanation, is a clear indication that MtGox is in control of at least 160k BTC still.
IF it is not, he would have to explain to us how it is not. Again, he remains silent about it, which makes no sense if this BTC was stolen. It would be in his interest to show us the addresses it was stolen from.
Nothing of what Karpeles does or says makes sense unless you dive into some extreme scenarios which are just more likely as otherwise the puzzle pieces do not connect.
Pure incompetence would not explain why there is all this secrecy about how exactly the coins escaped. Even if they stole them themselves, they could show us the chain of events of the coins escaping.
They are not doing this, because there are some men in black/mafia etc hindering them from doing that OR it would uncover all the fraud involved they were conducting.
If someone wants to bring up a theory which does not involve at least some part of the above, he would have to explain the secrecy of karpeles concerning this case.
He would have to explain why all of the sudden 160k ran through the gox API just recently, which stemmed from the 424k address Karpeles used to prove his exchange was not running a fractional reserve.
I can only repeat that there has to be put pressure on the authorities to interrogate him and squeeze the information out of him, we need to complete the puzzle, one of the most important information being the cold storage wallet addresses the coins were stolen from supposedly.
I agree with what you said. When you get down to it, beyond all the technology, we are dealing with issues that are fundamentally human. Who is the real "Robert Marie Mark Karpeles" beneath all that adipose tissue? What is his nature? What does he do?
He lies. He is a liar. That is what he does. First and foremost. That is his nature, his criminal nature. He never accepts responsibility for any of his actions and scapegoats others. He has zero empathy for human beings. Even when it was evident that his exchange was insolvent he never warned people and unconscionably continued to accept new deposits while simultaneously disallowing withdrawals. In this case he scapegoated bitcoin itself by saying that bitcoin had a "bug" in the protocol and as such he wasn't responsible for unbelievably massive losses that he knows are fabrications. He is currently moving 180k bitcoins possibly to circumvent an asset freeze.
http://www.forexnews.com/blog/2014/03/07/behind-historical-180000-bitcoin-transfer-mtgox-satoshi-early-adopter/From the article:
In this regard, such an event could mean both positive or negative connotations. Among those that believe that MtGox is in control of missing customer bitcoins but had lost private keys of its cold storage addresses, today’s transactions could be interpreted as them achieving success in reaccessing a portion of those funds. On the other hand, the transactions may be the result of insiders shuttling funds out of the company’s control before a court ordered liquidation seizes control of all assets. -
When his exchange was hacked in June 2011, he claimed "force majeure" as if the hack was an "Act of God." In the post he demonstrated a callous disregard for the victims saying "I'd prefer being working on 'Stuff that matters®.'"
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=20535.0 He declared trades invalid and oddly said, "we resisted most hack attempts, this one was 'strong' enough to go through." He demonstrated a misunderstanding of the law that is revealing. He uses the word criminality when what happened in that case was cause for a civil action, not a prosecution. Strangely he was concerned with criminal liability even though that wasn't in the cards. This misplaced concern may stem from an earlier episode that shaped his life, forcing him to flee France for another country. His blog (now removed) was titled "Magical Tux in Japan." "Geekness brought me to Japan!" The truth was his criminal conviction in France for "computer fraud" made it difficult to continue to swindle others. Hence the move to Japan.
Please take a moment to read the following two articles:
1. Robert Marie Mark Karpeles is a criminal convicted of "computer fraud" in France who fled that country to live in Japan
source:
http://gawker.com/does-mt-goxs-ceo-have-a-secret-history-of-online-payme-15347521102. Robert Marie Mark Karpeles is a con artist who preys on others. The Mt. Gox "bankruptcy" will be his biggest scam yet. One half of a billion dollars scammed from customers.
source:
http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/2014/03/03/exclusive-tibanne-co-ltd-sentenced-2013-mark-karpeless-lies-new/Mark Karpeles, CEO of Mt. Gox is claiming in sworn bankruptcy declarations that 750,000 bitcoins (roughly half of a billion dollars) were lost due to transaction malleability. He falsely claims that transaction malleability is a "bug" in bitcoin and that the money was lost through no fault of his own. In fact transaction malleability is a known issue since 2011 and is handled without difficulty by most implementations of Bitcoin. There has no doubt been some losses due to his poor implementation of bitcoin from transaction malleability but it is impossible to believe that a significant fraction of 750k bitcoins could have been lost this way.
This bankruptcy is not a liquidation.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/212476729/Chapter-15-Petition-Filed-by-Mark-Karpeles It is a Chapter 15 reorganization very similar to Chapter 11 reorganization. Only Mt. Gox KK has filed for bankruptcy. The parent company Tibanne, and its US subsidiary mutum sigillum LLC have not filed for bankruptcy. Nor has Mt. Gox the Delaware corporation filed for bankruptcy. Mark Karpeles has not filed for individual bankruptcy either. All of this taken together means that Mark Karpeles is likely planning to use this bankruptcy of one isolated entity to clear all debts and then reopen the exchange under a new name in order to fleece everyone again. He recently registered the domain Gox.com and is planning to relaunch the exchange under a new brand which already has a new logo. (source:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/209050732/MtGox-Situation-Crisis-Strategy-Draft) The next bankruptcy hearing is on April 1, 2014 (how appropriate a date). We need to make ourselves heard. If we are lucky we can get this bankruptcy dismissed or at least throw a big monkey wrench into the proceedings. I brought this thread to the attention of Theymos and asked for help:
You can tell when a transaction very likely has not been modified through malleability: if it's a totally standard transaction using normal encodings, then it is very unlikely to have been modified. Bitcoin-Qt doesn't normally create unnatural transactions with strange encodings, but other clients might, so you probably can't get an exact count of altered transactions.
The known sources of malleability that you could check for in the block chain are listed here:
https://gist.github.com/sipa/8907691 -Theymos
The best way to arm ourselves is with information. I asked Theymos how we could check for transaction malleability in the block chain. According to Theymos it seems like with standard encodings it is really easy to rule out TM at least with Bitcoin-Qt. As he said we couldn't get an exact count of TM but we could at least establish an upper bound by ruling out all the standard transactions. That might be enough. Other things we could do would be to cross-reference transactions listed in btc_xfer_report.csv against suspected TM transactions.
I'm interested in this enough to be willing to coordinate the effort and possibly provide bounties for meeting milestones. I welcome any suggestions to making this work and to ensure that our methodology is perfectly sound. There's no reason to do this analysis unless it is rock solid.
PM me or respond publicly if you are interested.
