Topic: [ANN] Mt.Gox overview: January 2012 / Transparency - page 2. (Read 7058 times)

The cost is "52,500 yen (before tax 50,000 yen) + Data Charge x Output Records" (I estimate to be around 700 bucks).

But before anyone goes spending any money, they should be aware that Teikoku Databank makes no assurances on the veracity of the financial statements you buy from them.  Probably because their financial statement data for privately held Japanese firms is (by and large) gathered via surveys.  It is entirely possible that Mr. Karpeles submitted MtGox's financial data to Teikoku Databank himself.


Many types of audits performed by public accountants. The SSAE 16 referred to by casascius would provide an opinion on the internal controls implemented in MtGox's end-user systems vis-à-vis the system's ability to provide reliable financial data.  Some caveats with an SSAE 16 are: the audit is based on management's description of the controls/system, the audit gives no opinion on the accuracy of the financial data extant in the system being audited, and the audit gives gives no opinion on the accuracy of the service firm's consolidated financial statements.

What's the cost? And who's collecting the BTC to buy a copy to share with the community?

I guess I misunderstood what an audit is. I thought is was one that shows where the money is, oppose to showing that the patella is connected to the femur.


An adult by the name of Bruce Wagner once stepped on Holy Ground and even provided us a video of his adventure. Does that count? BTW, does anybody know where we can view said video?

~Bruno~

Heh, Teikoku Databank is a market research firm.  They do not provide audit services.  Mr. Karpeles should be a little more careful about the language he uses in his outside communications.

Seriously, I doubt an outside auditor has ever set foot into MtGox/Tibanne offices.  The only need they have for a CPA of any kind is for their taxes.

E-mail from Mark Karpeles to me, received 10 July 2012, 05:17 UTC

Periodic deposit/withdrawal volumes, gross turnover, revenue/opcosts...these things don't provide ANY worthwhile information about the risk of doing business with you.  Why would would you bother having them attested to by a third party auditor?   

I'd also point out that as a practical matter, it's impossible to audit BTC balances on financial statements.


LOL wut?  MtGox told you that a copy of their audit was available for purchase from their auditor?!?  That would really be something.  Who at MtGox told this to you?

If you ask MtGox if they've done an audit, their answer is YES, we've done it, just look at our name Tibanne is listed at such-and-such Japanese website.

If you ask for the audit report though, their answer is basically... "Aww, shucks.  Sorry, we can't let you see it.  You actually have to pay for your own copy of it straight from the auditor, we can't let you see ours.  And it's really expensive.  Sorry about that."

If you ever could see the audit, and if it's even in English, it almost certainly was written by someone who doesn't have a clue what a Bitcoin is, and doesn't cover whether MtGox has USD and BTC to cover customer balances, it probably merely covers whether MtGox complies with some certain accounting standard and certifies that they filed some forms on time and in the proper format.

In other words, what I bet you WON'T see in the document: "We went through Tibanne's accounting records and discovered that they have liabilities of $X in the form of customer deposits, and as shown on the balance sheet and verified by bank statements, they have enough currency in their bank accounts to cover it."

And even MORE unlikely is a statement "We went through Tibanne's accounting records and discovered that they have liabilities of BTCX in the form of BTC customer deposits, and they signed messages for us proving that they own some certain addresses, and we verified ourselves on the block chain that they have all of the BTC they claim they have."

The audit I want to see would contain statements like that.

MtGox says getting such an audit is impossible or unfeasible due to cost, because according to them, they are a multinational conglomerate and any auditor would have to trot the globe just to confirm your money is there.  They even told me that some of the bank accounts they use don't offer internet banking.  (It's a multinational conglomerate kind of like Sony, but of course, if the website goes down while one guy is sleeping, it stays down for 4 hours until someone wakes him up!  Go figure.)

As I own a business that has undergone such audits several times, I know these we-can't-get-an-audit claims are simply untrue.  The first exchange or business who comes to the table with a SSAE 16 or comparable audit is going to be a major asset to the Bitcoin community.

Will we see an audit some time this year?

We did not forget about it, but we are concentrating our effort somewhere else at the moment!

Are you guys working on releasing the report for the last four months?

Hi, the N.2 is coming soon, we have been so much busy on other projects that we had to postpone this Transparency Overview. But do not worry we did not forget about it

Cheers

What's the latest number ? 
Is it time to release NO.2 ?

We have been discussing this for a long time and even shared some data and discussed this with some of you at CES, what we published yesterday was in fact something we planed for a longtime. But your comments and others ones has been taken into consideration to make it happen.

Cheers

As stated in our first post : "Also, we plan to have this document verified by third party auditors for future release". There is not yet any auditing entity for this first publication. Once we have one, we will publish their information on the document and on our webpage. But please keep in mind that this may take time, not only to find the auditing company that will do the job we need, but it will also take time for them to audit us.

Please make MTGOXLIVE transparent (aka live) during heavy trading periods. Thank you.

Who is the outside auditing entity?

Excellent! As a customer I couldn't be happier to read this and I feel now more assured about having my business with you than ever before. Really huge props for being first to make this move which is word for word what I suggested to cryptoxchange!

You see cryptoxchange? This is what you could have done and been first to get an edge, but you dropped the ball..

Again, major props to MtGox!

This is awesome.

But, can you guys please fix your data API?  GoxLive and websockets is consistently down during peak trading, then bitcoincharts  lags by minutes, and orders on mtgox are stuck pending for excruciatingly long.

Good to see the pro-activeness.

This wouldn't be useful: they could publish any bitcoin address that wasn't theirs and claim funds they don't own.

What would be useful is if they signed a message to prove ownership of private keys, which then could be used to deduce their holdings.

But that would come at a major expense of network-wide anonymity for users - anyone could positively identify exit of funds from MtGox.  Not a whole lot of users would like that, so it would be a major tradeoff.  Any investigation that arrived at one of these addresses would be met with legal demands placed on MtGox: "we know this address is yours, so we hereby compel you to tell us who got these funds."

A plausible compromise might be for them to sign only their cold storage, which would compromise anonymity only for the largest transactors who probably have to "d0x" themselves to death anyway.

Even if they signed only 50% of their bitcoins, if they were bitcoins that rarely or never moved because they were cold storage, I would probably be 90% as satisfied as had they signed 100% of their coins.  I would want to know that the cold storage had not just appropriate storage, but proper contingency plans (so that one plane crash or one death wouldn't send my coins to their grave).

All of this recent disclosure is actually a great thing for Bitcoin as a whole.  The more people who are willing to leave money in MtGox without fear it will vanish, the deeper the order books will get, hence greater liquidity and less chance for sudden swings in the price.

Does Mt. Gox publish the address of it's Bitcoin holdings so that anybody can use block explorer to check that they have the bitcoins they are supposed to have.