fuck it... i think i might be on team kevin. I've been pro roll back since I heard about what happened. I still am, but after reading Kevin's long post he's obviously well educated (more than me at least
) My main issue is that the sell off was not legitimate. It's akin to a bank robber stealing 1oz gold coins and then selling them all off at a flea market for $10 when people know they're worth $1500 each. Sure, you're going to buy buy buy. But at the end of the day, it's basically receiving stolen property which at least in the states is a crime.
I'm almost willing to think this option 3 as layed out by Kevin could be the best thing to do. The rollback was obviously a hasty decision, as I'm sure in such a panic state it would be hard to think of what else to do. Surely the idea of covering the losses didn't just come to mind. A mainsteam type business would have insurance for things like this and it wouldn't be about coming out of pocket as the business operator.
Option 3: Mt Gox takes responsibility, and reimburses the original account owner's account to the best of their ability.
+ The exchange is forced to deal with the consequences of their negligent lapse in security
+ Faith in the trading market would be largely restored if not increased
+ Buyers who placed orders that were executed get what they paid for
+ Mt Gox has clearly made several times more revenue (through trading fees) than this incident would cost them to completely absorb.
+ If this became an expected feature of an exchange, only exchanges that actually protected our accounts would survive.
+ Mt Gox is the only party that can go after the auditor that they are claiming was responsible for this incident
- It is uncertain if Mt Gox actually has that much liquid reserve to do this fully.
I do however have my doubts about how option 3 would effect the bitcoin community. How does that effect value to know that some guy just got nearly 300k bitcoins for a little more than the money you've insvested in mining equipment over the past month?
If a bank is robbed and the robber simply transfers money to other peoples accounts, what do you think the bank would do? They're not going to let people keep the ill-gotten monies.
I just know I would not want to be MTGox. And if I were the guy w\ 500k bitcoins, I'd feel obligated to lessen the blow to Kevin for being a stand up guy. Kevin as he said could have simply hit withdraw over and over again and taken out much more btc than he did, but he's obviously an honest guy w\ morals.