I think a rollback is the first step. Put things back to before the crash. In fact, I would suggest a transaction-by-transaction examination of (at least) the last week. We need a disinterested 3rd party to do this. NOT Kevin, and NOT MT. I have no idea who, but I do not envy their headaches.
We absolutely agree on the 3rd party audit, this needs to happen. I think we simply disagree on the time frames involved here. I'd like, before we roll back, to actually know if we should roll back just this one 500,000 btc trade, or if there have been dozens, hundreds, or thousands of illegitimate trades for much smaller amounts of bitcoins that no one noticed? Does the community just pretend these didn't happen and simply move on? I honestly don't really have a good answer or solution here since no one knows the extent of the problem. And this is why the rollback as a concept really concerns me. MtGox is picking an arbitrary transaction to roll back from - granted an extraordinary transaction that had a large amount of publicity and upset users. One thing I've learned from operating sites that are high profile targets for attack, is that if you do notice someone exploiting a hole - usually you can go back in forensics and see other people exploiting that hole in a much more quiet and smart manner. Sometimes these attacks go back years, before being noticed.
I understand you're trying to get back to normalcy as quickly as possible, and that does make sense and I wish for it too. I actually agree that a rollback is a good idea, if it can be relatively certain we know it will actually fix anything other than simply giving 500k btc back to mtgox, and then we go on merrily being robbed from unknowingly by some other (very likely to exist with the state this code is apparently in) exploit until someone comes along and fucks it up for the smart hackers again by drawing attention. Rinse and repeat.
I stated this in IRC, so you don't think I'm making up hypothetical concerns here. I trade bitcoins for cash, locally in person by executing a real-time trade on MtGox and letting them watch, to ensure I'm not charging them any more/less than up-to-the-minute market rate. I get cash, they get bitcoins sent from MtGox to their wallet address.
If a rollback can happen now at any time, how am I to conduct this business any longer? I could be buying "stolen" bitcoins unknowingly, and have them taken from my account at a later date (how long do I have to wait for the transaction to "clear"?). I am now out real money, since I conduct an actual business that will make my customers whole in the event of one of my vendors making a mistake. It's the right thing to do.
I simply want to know the extent of the problem, the fixes being implemented, and the policy/plan for such situations moving forward. I personally believe MtGox has lost their "right" to claim privacy/business secrets on this one as they've already lost the benefit of the doubt by having their entire database stolen. Considering none of these answers have been forthcoming, I think it's starting to become obvious this problem is quite a bit more complicated than a simple hacked account. Once answered (and answered truthfully this time, if that's even a possibility any longer) I can then evaluate my risk exposure based on legitimate and truthful information, which I currently cannot do.
