Like the subject says: how did they calculate that 744,408 BTC are missing?
I've searched unsuccessfully for an analysis / answer to this question (and apologize if it's obvious somewhere else - please just point me to it). I also realize this is somewhat of an academic exercise since there isn't much official information (although there obviously is information being shared privately via back channels, as evident by the joint statement issued by other exchanges).
Looking at the "Crisis Strategy Document" (
http://www.scribd.com/doc/209050732/MtGox-Situation-Crisis-Strategy-Draft), which is 'more or less true', on page 2 it explicitly says "744,408 BTC are missing". However the assets and liabilities table on page 5 doesn't seem to make sense. It lists the following liabilities:
624,408 BTC(Customers)
+120 000 ( MtGox)
-80 208 BTC From banned or suspicious accounts
(Of note might be the fact that those last 2 numbers don't have a comma separator, while ALL the other numbers in the entire document do. Perhaps these were added by someone after that fact that got confused?)
Note if you explicitly do the math, 624,408+120,000-80,208 = 664,200. You only get the 744,408 number if you ignore the 3rd item.
The first item I assume is just an easy tally of all the user account totals and seems reasonable based upon the estimate of 1.1 M accounts with 550,000 verified customers. (although note how that number is exactly half of the previous one, likely indicating this was a ballpark estimate. This is also a reasonable extrapolation from the 60,000 accounts they said they had in June 2011 (
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=18858.0;all)
The third item is obviously subtracting out the totals of 'bad' accounts. The second item is the confusing one to me. Why would 'MtGox' owe 'MtGox' another 120,000 BTC? Anyone have any ideas? One hypothesis I'd suggest is that this is actually the 'cold storage' estimate and it was accidentally put into the liability column when it should have been in the assets column.
While I'm at it, the income statement calculations on page 8 seem odd too (unredacted version available at
https://i.imgur.com/u9aP9Hg.png).
First as a baseline, in April 2012, "Mt. Gox was receiving between $5 million and $20 million in incoming transfers each day, while paying out somewhere between $300,000 and $1 million" (
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/11/mtgox/all/). Worst case, that's a net of $4M per day. While I'm sure that didn't keep up long and is likely somewhat of an exaggeration, even 10% of that would still result in a significant net income over a year.
Bitcoincharts (
http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg360ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv) shows that for the past year, a total of ~16M BTC traded last year (average of 45K BTC per day). At a normal fee of 0.53%, that's 85K BTC in fees (236 BTC / day average). If they converted those fees everyday automatically into USD, that would amount to $17.7M from fees ($50K / day average). However I doubt they actually do that. Most of it is probably kept as BTC.
Compare that to the second column of the income statement sheet, which shows net sales of $10.7M for the current year and $1.3M for the previous year that includes April 2012, which doesn't match up very well with the data above. Am I missing something? My suspicion is that they tried to keep a lot of company assets in BTC after the issues with DHS and Coinlab in May 2013 in order to 'keep them off the books' so to speak. Alternatively they just have no clue what their actual finances are or were grossly faking a lot of trade volume data.
Any thoughts from people more financially savvy then I am?
