Topic: MtGox withdrawal delays [Gathering] - page 42. (Read 908602 times)

For me, Mark is indeed the chief suspect, but I know no evidence that will rule out other possibilities -- including embezzlement by some other MtGOX manager or staff, theft of paper wallets by a physical intruder, hacking by a complete outsider, etc..

The people who were suing MtGOX in the US claimed to have evidence of wrongdoing, but unfortunately the withdrew their lawsuit to support the Sunlot proposal.

We can only hope hope that a police investigation will someday find the culprit.

Fixed that for you.

I am feeling a bit dizzy now.  More than 600'000 coins were stolen or embezzled from MtGOX by parties unknown, an established bankruptcy executor was duly appointed by a Japanese court with the mission to take away what is left from Mark and distribute it to the victims in the fairest way possible --- and somehow HE is now the villain against whom the weapons must be turned?

Good luck getting enough people to support the blacklist for it to have the desired effect. There have been countless topics about blacklisting, generally (from my observation) the majority supports fungibility instead.

I simply suggest Guerrilla tactics instead to attack Kobayashi directly. I think he is a lawyer with several years of professional experience. Moreover, even in Japan. I'm sure he has excellent contacts and certainly knows his stuff. So we have no chance. It's as if Barbarians attack the Roman Empire in an open field battle. We are just wasting time and energy. We only can lose.

I have set myself a deadline to the end of the year. I'm hoping to have developed my tracking system then so far that we can make the 200,000 coins worthless. So Kobayashi can no longer sell them. If he does not give it back to us, they lose their value. We can not beat him legally but we can blackmail him in the normal manner because we are many. With this I had the best experience in the past. I'm an active union member. We can strike! No Gox victim will accept the 200,000 Gox Coins if Kobayashi embezzled these coins. In my view a clear and neat solution. There is no need for a lawyer.

By the way: I have no problems with lawyers, but I think they do not help us here.

Lets just hope there was a LOT of criminal money there, which is not being claimed.

Sorry, here's a link to their main web site:
http://cc-int.eu/
I googled some more and found it. The head man is Dr. Simon Perry.  Here's a bio posted on their site. Sounds legit

They may be legit, of course.  Or they may be legit but not as competent and effective as they say they are.

That list of "updates" is mostly pointers to articles and news published by other people.  I don't see them doing much on their own...

 

Their US subsidiary did have $2.9 million seized last year by the USG. It's been awhile, but I don't remember any other seizures.

Edit: Correction, there was another $2.1 million seized around the same time.

The CCI web site has been up there for months, and is fairly regularly updated. I will of course let them defend themselves, yet have never really heard any complaints about data theft. A quick google search turned up absolutely nothing. I'd be curious if anyone else has had a negative experience with this company. It never hurts to be a little cautious.

I found their "update" page to be quite enlightening:
http://www.mtgoxinvestigation.com/updates.html

Hm, this site looks very suspicious to me.  Could be an attempt to steal people's data, or worse.

IIRC, analysis of the database yielded only 70'000 accounts that had some nontrivial balance (I don't recall the threshold, but it was 1 BTC at most). 

I would think that a client with less than 500 USD balance (1 BTC) would be very unlikely to  file, since his return would be at most 1/5 of that, or 100 USD.  Many of those above that threshold will not file because they have dirty hands.  So the claims should be less than 50'000 probably much less.

More victims may give up if Kobayashi goes by "method X" and require claimants to provide the full history of their deposits and withdrawals.

There is actually no evidence at all that Mt. Gox cash or bitcoins were ever seized by the USG, nor even any means for them to do so. Were some government involved in a seizure, then it would have to be the Japanese one, although it could have been done at the request of another government such as the U.S.

However, if all of the coins are actually still intact, and the claim of 850,000 BTC once held by Mt. Gox deemed bogus, then it's possible its cash deposits were merely frozen up by its banks. A bank officer can do that simply by typing in one or two commands. This act alone would be sufficient to drive Mt. Gox into bankruptcy, as it could never pay its bills or employees.

Were frozen bank funds the actual cause of the bankruptcy and not missing coins, then there should be an investigation into the banks' motivations for any such freeze, especially when taken in light of the seemingly coordinated PR campaign about how bitcoin "needs" to be regulated, and the spate of DDoS and transaction malleability attacks on Mt. Gox and other exchanges which took place at the same time in late February.

It should be noted that CCI, a Swiss investigative firm, has already documented a pattern of manipulation by Mt. Gox's European banks which are linked to its Japanese ones. See: http://www.mtgoxinvestigation.com/

A good balance of the situation.  I am not a lawyer and not even a client, but anyway here are my guesses as to what will Mr. Kobayashi do:

I would almost bet on these.  Paying in bitcoin could lead to squabbles later, due to variable value of bitcon etc.  Paying in yen will simplify his accounting, and he has plenty of legal and practical excuses for going that way.  The trade history is irrelevant if he chooses "method X", and could be obtained from the MtGOX databases if he chooses "method Y".

Even if there are a few thousand claims, the "army" of validators would not have to be that big.  The main difficulty, I suppose, will be to verify the BTC deposits and withdrawals (if by "method X") or whether the MtGOX accounting of trades and balances have not been doctored (if by "method Y").  Apparently he has already hired bitcoin-savy computer experts to help him with the technical details.

Almost certain, too, unless (perhaps) if the buyer has strong proof of the transaction (like, a notarized contract).   Even then, selling one's account may be seen as an attempt to evade the banks' KYC/AML measures, and so it may bring trouble for buyer and seller.

To be safe, the original owner who registered at MtGOX and provided his ID would have to file the claim, and then turn over the spoils to the buyer.

If the payout is to be in yen, he will have to auction the coins anyway, and then the proceeds of the auction (minus the auctioner's  fees) will be added to the money to be distributed.

This rule is implicit in "method X" above.  Those lucky bastards will walk away with a profit, at the expense of those who failed to withdraw in time.  But such "injustice" is inevitable; their situation would be like that of the Madoff clients who withdrew before the collapse, or WorldCom shareholders who sold all their shares in 2000.

You have a point there: the number "800 k" ultimately comes only from a highy suspect source, that has flatly lied to customers in the past.

But, if the actual sum of all balances was only 220'000, it means that the balances of some clients have been artificially inflated, by 600'000 BTC in total.  A malicious management would have an obvious motivation for doing that: namely, ensuring that those special clients will get awarded the lion's share of the 220'000 actual coins, at the expense of other clients.

I hope that Mr. Kobayashi is aware of that possibility, and is aware that many clients are aware of it.

The "leaked" database could have been doctored, while the original is still quite intact and unchanged. Perhaps a phony db was leaked out as part of the instigator's plan for covering up tracks. The takedown of Mt. Gox appears to have been well thought-out including a coordinated public relations campaign to convince the public that management had been incompetent and there is a "need" to regulate bitcoin.

Perhaps most people "agree" on the amount of 800K bitcoins, because its what they've been told to believe. The only real sources for this information are a leaked database and the bankruptcy filing which blames the problem on a "bug in the bitcoin system." This latter claim has more or less been proven false.

It's far easier for me to believe the smaller amount of bitcoins. 200K BTC are still worth in the neighborhood of $100 million. Any much larger sum of coins would seem ridiculous for a three year old company such as Mt. Gox.

Of course I am merely speculating, which is exactly my point, even the amount of bitcoins Mt. Gox held is still very much in doubt. There needs to be full disclosure of this kind of information before talking about dividing up "the spoils".

The 800'000 number is the sum of all BTC account balances in the leaked database.  It is basically the total BTC that clients deposited over MtGOX's history, minus all the BTC that they have withdrawn.

If indeed MtGOX never had the 600'000+ coins that it claims to have lost, we would have to conclude that the database has been doctored at some point; and in that case it is hard to say that the trades of non-existent coins by Joe and Bill were real.

However, most people seem to agree that the 800'000 figure is correct, and the 600'000+ coins were indeed lost.  But, even with this assumption, the trades by Joe and Bill were not quite real, since the theft or embezzlement must have happened at least a year ago.  The artificial 10% overprice that MyGOX maintained for a long time since then was at odds with its real situation, for example; so it is questionable whether the trading in that period is "real".

From the creditor meeting papers, I understand that Kobayashi has already transferred to an address of his own the 200'000+ coins that Mark "found". 

But, even now, no one seems to know when the other 600'000 disappeared, nor the addresses where they were transferred to.  Presumably Kobayashi and/or the police will get from Mark the legitimate MtGOX addresses that held the coins before they disappeared; but how could one prove that the addresses where they were transferred to did NOT belong to Mark (or any other suspect)?

Even if the 600'000+ coins were embezzled, rather than stolen by an external hacker, it will be hard to prove that (unless the embezzler was really incompetent at hiding his tracks.)  An embezzler could have written down the private keys on a slip of paper and handed it over to an external accomplice who issued the fatal transaction.  That leak would leave no trace in any logs, and it would be impossible to connect the embezzler to that transaction.

I understood, and your point is quite valid. However, there is no justification for using Method X should 100% of the coins still be there, never were really gone, and the 850,000 BTC number was a complete hoax. When all the coins are accounted for, it means all of the trades of both Joe and Bill were perfectly "real", and so there is no reason at all to use the Method X for computing each depositor's share.

Madoff's case was quite different, because he was running a Ponzi. On the other hand, if you genuinely believe Mt. Gox was a Ponzi, then perhaps after all the court should favour Method X for division. How can you be sure though without some proof of how many coins Mt. Gox originally held at the time of its bankruptcy? After the known lie about the "bitcoin bug" in the bk filing, why do you accept the rest of it as being true?

Perhaps I did not get my point across yet. 

Joe Coiner deposited 100 BTC into MtGOX when they were worth 50$ each.   Since then, he traded them with such skill that, when MtGOX collapsed, he thought that he had 1000 BTC in his account, which at the time were worth 800$ each.

Bill Bitter, on the other hand, deposited 1000 BTC at the same time as Joe, but then traded so clumsily that he belived that he had only 100 BTC left at the end.

By method X of computing claims, Joe's claim is 100x50 = 5000$, while Bill's is 1000x50 = 50'000$.   So Bill will get 10x as much as Joe from Mr. Kobayashi.

By the other method Y, Joe's claim is 1000x800 = 800'000$, and Bill's claim is 100x800 = 80'000$.  So its is Joe who will get 10x as much as Bill.

Method X was used by the US courts when processing the claims of Madoff's victims, and someone claimed that it is the standard procedure in japan too. 

So, obviously, the first thing you all need to do is find out whether Kobayashi will use method X, method Y, or some other method.

Sorry, I am not sure I understand what you mean.

The 600'000+ bitcoins that were stolen/embezzled should be considered lost, unless by some miracle the thief is identified, caught by the police, prosecuted, and persuaded to return the coins.  Kobayashi may ask the police to investigate the theft, if he has not done so; but that is not his job, and the bankruptcy proceedings will be closed well before the police investigation is complete.  If said miracle occurs and those coins are recovered, the proceedings may perhaps be reopened to distribute them; but it is no use to discuss that possibility now.

So, the best you will get back, in the foreseeable future, is 1/4 of what you have lost.

Kobayashi was appointed by the court to figure out what is left of MtGOX's assets, collect the claims by the clients, validate those claims, and distribute among them those remaining assets -- mainly 200'000+ bitcoins and a couple million dollars, that were still in possession of MtGOX and that he has now legally taken custody of.  He will obviously charge his fees for doing that non-trivial task (and for the consultants that he needs to hire), but plenty will be left over.

No one can get any of those coins without his agreement and the approval by the japanese court.   Attempts to do so would be theft and worse, so don't even think about it.

IMHO, the first thing you all should do is to find out how the claims are going to be computed; if that is not decided yet, how much freedom the Japanese law allows.  (There are principles of openness and fairness to all claimants, whether bitcoins and money can be accounted separately, etc. which may constrain the method even if the law does not determine it.)  Note, again, that your preferences are not relevant, unless Kobayashi and the court choose to consider them.  Note also that, depending on the accounting method chosen, the amount you may claim may be a million dollars, or may be zero.

If you are reasonably certain that you are entitled to a large sum, I belive that it pays to hire a Japanese lawyer, at least for basic advice.  If your expected refund is not that large, maybe you should join a group and hire a lawyer as a group.  Do not try to understand the laws without a lawyer.   Heed the old saying, "he who chooses to be his own lawyer has a fool for client and an idiot for lawyer."  Think of them as medical doctors: they may be greedy bastards, but if you need them, you have to use them.

Finally, some "legal" advice: when dealing with the law or lawyers, it helps a lot to wear a decent business suit and tie.  Not a social jacket & pants, not party-animal uniform, not a young-silicon-valley-genius t-shirt, not a I'm-camping-in-the-public-park stye outdoor clothing.  It sounds stupid, I know, but the universe is an incredibly stupid place.