Topic: SaveGox.com - page 3. (Read 12573 times)

In a chess match, you cannot assume that the other player will do what you would like him to do.  You must assume that, at every move, he will do whatever he can that is best for him.  If he can take your queen, he will take it, no matter how much that upsets you. If he can checkmate, he will, even if that would be a PR disaster among you and your friends.

Same here.  Doing a thorough and honest audit, distributing the 220'000 coins fairly to clients, starting a criminal investigation to find the other 600'000 coins and distributing them to clients -- that is what you would like Sunlot to do; but that is completely irrelevant when trying to predict  what they will do.  You must ask what they can do -- ethical or not -- that will result in most money for them.  This includes telling lies, falsifying and omitting documents, making secret deals with anybody, etc.. 

(And then there is the issue of the two different criteria for distributing the coins, by final account balance or by input/output balance.  Each choice is good for some clients but bad for others.  Sunlot obviously has chosen which clients it likes the most.)

To set things clear, I could not care less about whether MtGOX clients get their coins back or not.  What I want is that all the criminals involved in the MtGOX scam and anyone who tries to help them get taken out of circulation and deprived of their money.  Anyone who doesn't like being robbed should want that too.

[ ... ]

Perhaps this will make things more clear:

Suppose there were only two clients, J and M.

In reality, when MtGOX collapsed, J had 200'000 BTC balance in his account, M had zero BTC, and MtGOX had 200'000 BTC in their wallets.  Then if those 200'000 BTC were distributed proportional to the balances, J would get 200'000 BTC, M would get nothing.

But, according to the doctored database, J still had 200'000 BTC, M had 600'000 BTC.  J checks the balance and says it is correct.  Then MtGOX should have had 800'000 BTC in their wallets, but unfortunately 600'000 were stolen by invisible goblins so only 200'000 are left.  Now, if those remaining 200'000 BTC were distributed proportional to the balances in that database, J would receive 50'000, and M would receive 150'000.

If MtGOX were liquidated by the court instead, the 200'000 BTC would be split between J and M according to their deposits and withdrawals, which are much harder to doctor since they can be checked against bank records and the blockchain.  So perhaps J would get most of the 200'000 and M would get close to nothing.

Is that clear enough, or should I use a bigger font?

Thanks for the compliment.  It must have been my team-sized paranoid imagination that made me write that MtGOX was obviously insolvent (because it did everything that every insolvent company does), back when most seasoned bitcoin experts insisted that everything was fine.  Because, one could not assume then that all (or a majority of) the MtGOX management and their improvised auditors had malicious motives.

This is quite incorrect. First, for the purposes of a recovery plan, each customer is worth a NEGATIVE amount equal to its account balance (that is what MtGOX owes him), plus a positive amount equal to the fees that he is expected to generate over, say 2 years.

IIRC, the sum of the accounts was found to be about 800'000 bitcoins, worth about 400'000'000 USD at current prices, plus a large amount of dollars.  That is the NEGATIVE part.

For the positive part, only active customers count; inactive customers, that do not trade, generate no income. IIRC, according to analysis of the database leak by @rpietila,  MtGOX had around 70'000 active customers, and that with a very generous definition of "active".  To pay 100 US$ of trading fees, a customer would have to trade a lot.  If the NewMtGOX decided to charge significant maintenance fees, most of those 70'000 customers would probably close their accounts.  So this positive term -- the value of MtGOX's customer base -- is very small, maybe only 1/100 of the negative term above.

The significant positive terms in the evaluation of MtGOX are the bitcoins and dollars that MtGOX actually had (I lost count, was it 220'000 BTC?).  Adding everything gives a huge NEGATIVE value for the company.  Who would pay even a satoshi for the "privilege" of having to pay hundreds of millions of dollars of debts?

The Sunlot proposal makes sense for them only because they propose to assume only the positive terms above, spend some of that money for certain expenses, and then perhaps distribute the crumbs to customers, thus declaring the debts extinct.

I wouldn't say that you need a particularly fertile imagination to suppose that the balances have been out for years, say because Mark or some associates decided to borrow, sell, short or whatever at the wrong time.

Then it would help to simply inflate the balances of those in on the scam. These are Goxcoins we are talking about here, remember; I don't see why inflating some balances would necessarily require deflating others.

One thing is for sure. The people wanting to take over have BTC in their eyes. Being one of those with "funds" in Gox I personally would like to see some kind of rehabilitation. But a 16.5% stake stinks. The sum of balance holders should have at least parity with the new owners - 50%, nothing less.

Quite the opposite.  If MtGOX is liquidated by the court, there may be a criminal investigation, initiated by the liquidators or by clients.  If Sunlot takes over, who knows.

We do not know who will do the audit. We know that Sunlot will distribute and spend the remaining coins without waiting for a criminal investigation.

I haven’t even gotten to the original content of Debonneville’s complaint that Pierce worked so hard to have stricken from all public records. As this is the internet, the sealed text is still available despite Pierce’s best efforts.
 
(...)
 
The statement from Debonneville reveals that Brock Pierce and Marc Collins-Rector were unusually close. The complaint also alleged that Brock Pierce misappropriated stock and about $200,000 of IGE’s money in order to pay the settlements in the civil cases against Pierce and Collins-Rector. Additionally, Debonneville revealed that Pierce made business decisions with Yantis behind Debonneville’s back. Specifically, Pierce knowingly agreed to Yantis’s plan to sell duped and exploited virtual currency and items to MMORPG players, something that IGE had taken a very public and vocal stand against in the months before its merger with Yantis.

Quite the opposite.  If MtGOX is liquidated by the court, there may be a criminal investigation, initiated by the liquidators or by clients.  If Sunlot takes over, who knows.

[ You think that ] The court doesn't care about whether a deposit is real or not.  Why not?