Now, there are not a million options here:
1. Bitstamp pays $5M with the fees they charged. That's tough, because they had about $1.5M worth of trading each day. At a 0.3% average, that gives $4500 per day. It would take them 1111 days of such fees to pay for those $5M, running costs non accounted for. Impossible.
2. They get $5M from their insurance. I've been working with insurers for such matters myself. Can't find one that would do that, so I'd bet they weren't insured for such a hack.
3. They get $5M from investors. That's tricky. New investors won't be stepping into this mess, so that leaves the previous VC that brought $10M. But this money was probably spent. If not, why bringing it in in the first place? Maybe they'd add $5M to protect the $10M they invested prior to the hack, but that's a dangerous move. Not impossible, but doubtful...
4. They run on fractional reserves. Easy, as long as 88% of the funds remain there.
On which option would you bet?
I think your numbers are very misleading. At a price of $300, thats 5k coins a day. Most of the time they are doing significiantly higher volumes than this and the price was higher. I think you could reasonably double your volume estimate and the average price for last year for a more reasonable estimate, quadrupling your total, and quartering you time estimate.
Not impossible.
Agreed.
The average weekly volume for 2014 was ~BTC 96 000 (~BTC13 700 per day) . (Based on raw data from
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD)
0.3% x2 of 96 000 * 52 =BTC29 952 in fees. I'm not sure about the 0.3% number. The times two is because it's charged on both sides of the trade.
You are assuming they have to repay the full loss. We can reduce the loss by any safety margins they have already, although they may wish to re-establish those (at a higher level?).
The fee number needs to reduce by operating expenses.
So we have 19 000 less what they have already vs 30 000 less opex.
Where it lands up after those adjustments is anyone's guess.
If they had been converting to USD at higher prices then that would reduce their burden significantly (if they can buy back at current low prices).
