Although I haven't got funds @mtgox anymore, I'll supply you with some information in order to support anybody who wants to sue mtgox because I'm very interested in seeing Mark Karpeles at court for his actions. lost quiet a bit during the last days when leaving mtgox.
throughout the last week immediately after the first press release of mtgox regarding halted btc withdrawals, you could observe huge rhythmic btc dumps @mtgox every 2-5 minutes following always the same pattern ("the whale of mtgox"). the sum of these dumps up to now is approx 140000 btc at an average price of around us$270. ie a us$38 mio sell-off. there were a few stuck levels eg at us$261.24 yesterday and us$148.15 the day before yesterday. these were manipulated levels by the whale serving all asks above these levels every 2-5 minutes. this is very difficult to do through the api of mtgox. but very easy if you're in charge of the order book itself.
Therefore, you'll have to deal with either a very risky investor who is going to sue mtgox as well for his us$38+ mio funds @mtgox pretty soon.
if you take into account that most of the trading fees at mtgox were paid in btc throughout the last years (default setting), it is more likely that the whale rushing all the btc on the market is mtgox resp Mark Karpeles himself. This would be an easy way to transfer the customers fiat collected throughout the last years to his own account reducing his liability in € and us$. if you further take into account, that maybe a good portion of btc stored at mtgox got stolen, mtgox might blame the bitcoin protocol ("transaction malleability") as a cause for the loss. the result: Mark Karpeles got the customers fiat, the customers got stolen btc. the customers could file a charge against an unknown person for stealing their btc.
what does this mean? --> all data on the servers of mtgox must be assured immediately in order to investigate the fraud.
ressources:
http://bitcoincharts.com/http://bitcoinwisdom.com/http://coinsight.org/mtgox.htmlExactely my observations and thoughts. I posted the following on reddit:
I posted the following post four days ago. Unfortunately the post was downvoted (I guess by people who wanted to weaken posts that may foster sells at the Mt Gox market). Taking into account the new price level, there is - IMHO -now some real need for the truth, so that I want to post my post again and add something to this afterwards.
16 Feb 2014: "I observed the Mt Gox live market for hours yesterday and I have seen that the price decline is caused just by one trader who is kind of always selling off large amount of coins after price is just slightly increasing. Yesterday there was a phase in which somebody sold approx. 250 BTC every few minutes for hours. The same started this morning again. You have seen and you can see that indeed everybody on the market is willing to pay more, but the high sells of this one trader are causing the low price around 330 to 360$ yesterday and below 300$ today. If you have been aware of this, you could made a lot of (book value) profit from it. (...) [What is the reason, why one trader is selling automatically so many coins?] My theory is: MtGox themselves are doing this. They want to drop the price so low, because they want that after it becomes obvious that they are not having the coins, they hope that people will panic sell their book value coins and that they have little money to give then, because of the little fiat balances then."
Another thing that happend at this time was the following: I started to make short trades, so I sold my coins and placed a new order afterwards. Normally I placed every new buy order in front of a big buy order. But then I placed by mistake one "at the top of an existing other big buy order". A new sell was coming in (one of the big ones as aforementioned). The weird thing was, that all coins have been bought from the buy order "under" mine up to exactely my Satoshi (I hope you all get what I mean, I am not a native speaker). This was not coincidence, the numbers have been completely random. For me, this is one more argument that Mt Gox (with market transparency) made these big sells.
The plan of Mt Gox could be the following. (They can do this, even if they do not have the coins.)
1. Sell so many coins, that the market is completely crashed and that there is no more Fiat money in the system, that can make buys.
2. Wait until people get used to the new price level at Gox. Avoid people putting too much new fiat money into the system, by fostering speculations about insolvency.
3. At some point there are enough coins to buy to make a big profit.
And of course both is possible, Mt Gox may have lost some coins by theft and are doing this strategy to get equal balances again, or they are just megalomaniac and want to own a bigger piece of the bitcoin cake.