Topic: SaveGox.com - page 5. (Read 12562 times)

Two more questions:
A significant amount of BTC balances belong to very old accounts which haven't been touched for years.  93,442 BTC, 454,849 USD, 23,799 EUR, etc, in accounts not touched since 2012 or earlier.  MtGox had a clause in their ToS which allowed them to close accounts which hadn't been logged in to in more than 6 months.  Will those account owners be counted as creditors, or will the clause take effect and the account considered closed?  This will allow a significant higher payback to users.

Will there be a claims process where people have to actively make their claims?  If so, what happens to assets not claimed in this process?  Would payouts to the remaining creditors increase if some creditors fail to make their claim?

*listen*

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.

Another question for Jon. (I guess he'll answer my previous one when he wakes up.)

IIUC Mark Karpeles personally is a large creditor of Mt Gox the company, with a lot of bitcoins in his own exchange. A liquidation would put the claims of directors of the company last, but in rehabilitation you're supposed to pay everyone what they're owed, unless they specifically agree to forbearance.

Does this mean that Sunlot would be paying a large proportion of the remaining coins to Mark personally? If not, what would be the legal basis for not paying him?

Not disagreeing, just observing that the "concrete" debts (salaries, contractors, landlord, etc.), if any, must be much less than the remining assets.  So these  could get paid in full by liquidation.

I stil don't know how the clients will be handled by the liquidation court.  Will they be considered normal creditors, together with contractors and competing with them; or will they be considered a lower priority class?

IANAL, but IIUC rehabilitation requires that you actually become solvent; You can't just unilaterally cram down your debts to everybody, even if the majority of creditors agree. An example of how this has actually worked would be Intrade, where the founder died trying to climb Mount Everest and the new management inherited a company without the money they should have had. You can follow what happened here:
http://www.intrade.com/v4/home/latest-news/

The key point about this is that they need to get creditors to agree to give up their claims on enough of the debt to make the company solvent. In Intrade's case they were missing less than half of the money, and they had a good chance of getting the rest back through litigation (which they ultimately did). Since it's a voluntarily agreement between the company and each individual creditor, they can apply whatever terms they want to, as long as each creditor is prepared to accept them. Apparently Intrade didn't bother asking people owed less than $1000 to agree to forbearance.

The problem here is that if you've only got the order of 20% to 25% of what you owe, it only takes a small proportion of creditors to say "No, I insist that you pay me in full" to torpedo the whole thing. Presumably that (plus the general mendaciousness and shadiness of the people involved) is probably why the court hasn't been taking the idea very seriously.

I also think this is a good idea

50 % less creditors to deal with may make recovery quicker.


please note I think sunlot are buying mtgox at a bargain price
if mtgox had not "stuffed up" and lost all our money it could be worth as much as $700 mil ( about 700,000 customers at $100 per customer . )

at present I believe sunlot is the best option -see  sunlot FAQ

I would also like to see sunlot put some money in --- like $20 mil in a escrow account

-- okcoin and other plans are still un known - so cannot compare ----

The idea of prioritizing small clients is not bad by itself, but that could perhaps be proposed to the liquidation court.  AFAIK, Japanese liquidation law already establishes a "socially just" priority scheme: first any unpaid salaries and benefits, then actual creditors (banks, suppliers, landlords, contractors, utilities, etc.), and lastly investors.  I don't know where MtGOX clients would fit in this priority ranking.

The Sunplot proposal obviously cannot change the priorities of employees and actual creditors; the court could not possibly agree to that.  It apparently inserts the new owners and managers, as well as the expert investigator (Mr. Karpelès?) into this ranking, before the clients.  Isn't that so?

There is also the question of what should count as the claim of a client against MtGOX:  (1) the account balance he had at some point before the final shutdown (when, exactly?) according to MtGOX's internal ledgers, or (2) the total amount he deposited, minus the total amount he withdrew?   It is known which approach the liquidators will follow?

Since it is possible that the ledgers may have been altered with fake trades, or that some clients may have used insider knowledge or other fraudulent means while trading, approach (2) would seem safer, besides being arguably more just.  (If we were to trust the crowd analyses of the leaked MtGOX database -- which of course can be itself fake -- Mark and several of his friends are among the largest BTC balances.)

Perhaps the implicit aim of the Sunplot proposal is also to ensure that any distribution of coins will follow approach (1), rather than (2) or some other scheme that would exclude suspicious balances?

Perhaps it may, but I rather doubt it.
Believe it or not, but when I wrote 'some confidence in Bitcoin' I meant literally Bitcoin and not any particular exchange or rehabilitation project.
Right now, Bitcoin does need as much good public relations as it can get, and a quick and full compensation for the small-fish victims of the MTGox disaster would constitute good PR indeed.
A large group of angry customers who get back their funds means many less people who have (somewhat understandable) motivation to actively criticize and oppose the whole Bitcoin project.

Besides, the idea of compensating smaller creditors with some preference over bigger creditors appeals to my sense of justice. (Despite the fact that I do not belong to the former group).

Yeah, it may get them confident enough to buy TWO bitcoins and leave them in the New MtGOX.

I second this motion. This would lower the cost and effort of the subsequent operations related to creditors' equity.
Moreover, such action might help to restore some confidence in Bitcoin amongst many (and possibly: not well-off) individuals who tried to buy a fraction of bitcoin out of curiosity and got Goxxed instead.

Presumably the banking data should be OK but as far as the bitcoins go there are all kinds of uncertainties. You've got some logs, that may have been tampered with by hackers, insiders or both, created by software that is known to be broken in at least one serious way, resulting in the huge hole that you mention. You may well not have the software versions that wrote the logs, so you can't even tell _how_ it was broken. Wallets may or may not have been lost or deleted - who knows?

They may turn out to have surprisingly good records that will make it easy to follow the money, but the idea that you can be _confident_ that they did isn't credible.

Did you see the leaks?  We know we have logs of:
o Bank deposits and withdrawals (the banks keeps them for minimum 10 years, and can be checked against MtGox's records)
o Bitcoin deposits and withdrawals, to be verified against the blockchain.
o Every trade ever executed on MtGox.

There is a wildcard here. We don't know if all txids were saved in cases where a tx may be sent twice.  If only the last one was saved, this may be a problem.  It should still be possible to find those transactions using the spent outputs in MtGox's wallet.

This is enough to verify all balances.  Finding the people who stole BTC and/or money is a case for the police, but this is separate from the audit.

I have one suggestion to Sunlot: Pay out all BTC balances of 1 BTC or less than BTC in full at once.  This will get rid of 61840 creditors at a cost of maximum 7848 BTC (3.9% of the total amount of BTC), and I assume this will simplify dealings a lot.  You could do the same with users having less than the equivalent in fiat, and get rid of most of the rest at a similar cost.  (Cost will probably be lower, because most people's balances are less than the cost of withdrawing.)  Or is having as many owners as possible in Sunlot's interest?

You're being very optimistic about the powers of the audit there. That should be possible if Gox had reliable systems, kept thorough, accurate, comprehensive records, kept proper, archived backups and didn't tamper with any of the data, but do all those things sound likely to you? Bear in mind we're talking about people who didn't even keep their code in source control...

Either way I'd like to hear Jon confirm that Sunlot intend to pay out to creditors without waiting for the police to finish their investigation, which presumably he'll do if it's as obvious as you say.

I think this is obvious.  The press relase says: "Sunlot would immediately distribute Mt. Gox assets on a proportional basis determined by an independent audit"

The audit should reveal any mismatches between balances due to deposits, withdrawals and trading, and balances which are inflated due to manipulation of the database, double withdrawals due to malleability, etc.  Finding the people would be up to the police.  I assume Sunlot will verify the identity of people who want to withdraw their assets.

Hi Jon. Not a creditor so maybe it's none of my business, but I'm wondering: The FAQ says,


As you know,
1) People responsible for stealing bitcoins and/or hacking the database, whether insiders or external people, may have positive balances in the current system.
2) There is an ongoing police investigation into who is responsible for stealing bitcoins. This may turn up information that won't be available to Sunlot, since the police have a lot of powers that Sunlot doesn't.
3) Regardless of what happens in the bankruptcy, this investigation may not be completed very quickly.

Does Sunlot really intend to pay out before the police investigation is completed, even at the risk of giving the legitimate creditors' money to the people who have already robbed them?

Or would Sunlot in fact wait until the police investigation was complete, in which case things might not happen quite as quickly as the FAQ makes it sound?

I don't get the idea of the equity stakes! Please explain!

When the plan sails on and recovery is underway the price will easily shoot up back to $1000.
Very bad idea IMO

Ok Mark. You should take your old office to get you comfortable. Let's sit behind your desk and drink your coffee. Now, your new job is to sit there and try to remember how exactly you lost all that money. We believe the best way to remember is to continue doing the exact same thing you did during the last years. So, turn your display on and pick everything up where you left it. Just act neutrally like this whole mess with the courts and the media never happed. Once you remember, you can go on doing what every you want. Good luck and welcome at home.

I see.  Are you going to make the same offer to Mr. Karpelès, then?  Or is he the expert that you intend to hire to investigate the matter?

Now seriously: it is not a matter of "anger", but deterring further crimes from happening. 

It would be interesting to know, for starters, when did Mr. Gay-Bouchery became aware of MtGOX's insolvency, and what did he do about it then.