Fine, you want to cover your arses, but how many meetings do you need and how many days of research? How much financial loss are we, your customers, meant to take on the chin while you fart around?
The price of bitcoins is going up and up (possibly because there is no shorting facility available now), and as far as I can see:
- The arbitrarily chosen liquidation price they eventually settle at is going to leave me out of pocket as they'll close lower than my position, despite current price being higher. I could have taken that loss on the chin on day 0; but it's now getting painful to watch.
- Given no early indications (i.e. before the price started moving) of what the position closure procedure was going to be, I couldn't use other funds to hedge losses.
- My coins not being released means I can't even sell my coins when I think the current price is too high. That's an opportunity cost on top of any adverse closure policy.
It's quite possible that the delay while bitcoinica quibbles internally is resulting in a situation where we lose more in market moves than was stolen in the first place. e.g. 5.66/5 = 13% -- it doesn't have to move much more and we'll have a greater than 20% move. If Bitcoinica had (and I'm certainly not saying they should have) gone long with their USD holdings, they would have made back the stolen coins; surely that demonstrates the lunacy of sitting on deposits for this long?