Unless you are suggesting that the proceeds of the ICO would be used to purchase btc-e debt at a discount, however this would be difficult because afaik, there is no way to even begin to verify debt claims without access to the btc-e DB.
Even with access to the database, this would be very difficult. Over one million accounts and no required verification. I wonder what percentage of the accounts have anything associated with them besides username, email, password, IP logs.
Fair enough, who the hell wants to send BTC-e their documents? But I guess that's why we're in this mess...
Yes, it would be very messy for as long as the btc-e website is offline/down. In theory, the US government could bring the DB back online and allow users to transfer assets among each-other for the purpose of assigning debts.
Another issue is the fact that the US government does not appear to be holding any of btc-e's crypto assets. The btc-e hot wallet still contains around 400 BTC, and does not appear to have been drained. If the US government did not seize financial assets of btc-e that ultimately belonged to their customers, then their customers would probably not have a claim against the US government just because they forcibly caused btc-e to be shut down.
That's the strange thing about this. It seems like the US authorities probably
thought they were raiding BTC-e's main servers, including at least hot wallets. At this point, since they haven't announced any funds seized (pretty embarrassing press release really), I'm guessing the servers they seized were just pointing to remote servers.
The ETH wallet was moved today..... but we have no idea who moved it. Maybe it was the owners, maybe it was the US government, maybe it was just a dead man's switch.
In any case, the overall situation doesn't look good at all for the exchange's customers.....
The ETH that was moved is likely to be cold storage based on the fact that it was worth in the high 8 figures of USD. I don't think they would have any kind of 'dead man's switch' for cold storage, as in theory this would go untouched for long periods of time. It doesn't appear that the BTC hot wallets have been seized/moved as of the time of this post.
Based on all of the above facts, I think the ETH movement is the result of actions of the owners of btc-e. It is standard practice for financial institutions to change the combination of safes/vaults when an employee with access to a portion of the combination stops working at said financial institution, so it would not be unreasonable for the btc-e operators to generate a new cold storage setup/keys and move crypto into the new cold storage. I would say there is a good chance that the Alex guy likely had at least partial access to crypto held in cold storage.