There was also this giant order book on mtgox that kept filling up with new fiat bids every day - every day a new few slabs of 1K walls added, rather than this pathetic bitstamp orderbook where fiat is being subtracted every day and now 600 looks like a cliff to fall off of.
I know this is a bit off-topic for this thread, but.
I remember the MtGox orderbook topped at about 21 million USD at the height of the bubble April 2013. Then we got withdraw delays and the delays kept in increasing until MtGox finally just stopped processing USD withdraws after "temporary" halting them two weeks and then announcing that USD withdraws had "resumed" - but in reality they never resumed.
At this point in time quite a few big players bought BTC and transferred it out. There was a pretty big premium for doing so, but the difference was like $90 in real markets vs $105 at MtGox (huge in percent but not huge in $).
Then MtGox started rallying and the bidside of the orderbook there started increasing until it topped at around $40 million. I was frequently completely confused by the big bids at MtGox during the last rally.
"Who in their right minds deposit USD to an exchange you can not withdraw from?" I was thinking while posting warnings against MtGox in the "MtGox withdraw delays gathering" thread. It just made ZERO sense to me. I just could not understand where these big bids were coming from and who in their right minds would send huge amounts of fiat to an exchange you can't withdraw from. "Whales" have the resources to do some basic research, it's not like you throw a million dollars at something without doing a minimum of research.
The bankruptcy documents clearly show that MtGox has about HALF (or slightly less than half) of the fiat supposedly in customer accounts. Their story - seriously - is that they "discovered" this on February 24th 2014 during their "investigation" into the supposed "malleability" Bitcoin theft. Their story is that they had NO IDEA that this large amount of fiat was missing prior to this date.
I wonder: Was that large bid-side at MtGox and those big bids really actually there in the first place, or was this just a mirage of numbers-backed-by-nothing on our computer screens?
Regardless of what you think of that: Reality is that MtGox really doesn't have more than half the fiat supposedly in customer accounts as of now. I suspect that "money" never existed in the first place. What if the rally up to the November top was largely driven by NOTHING (as in computer-screen-fiat, not real fiat)? Just something to think about.
