I have sent 15,000 BTC to an address provided by Patrick Murck.
He or one of his clients will later confirm the receipt of the funds and also the escrow/representation relationship.
Thanks Zhou. It is a far cry from the 40K BTC / 40K USD stolen, but it is a start. Can you please share the transaction id?
Status: 4/unconfirmed, broadcast through 8 nodes
Date: 29/07/12 19:54
To: 1FqqBZnemCrcCDbz57Nk7LHLCN42hCHXEV
Debit: -15000.00 BTC
Net amount: -15000.00 BTC
Transaction ID: b87922d693b3d3b66da385592a07147cf0b8f31f78057ebb212eb60745b58cf9
Currently I can recover at most 20,000 BTC and $140,000 from Chen Jianhai.
If AurumXchange can reimburse the laundering fees for the Mt. Gox code (about $2,320.31) then it will be even better.
AFAIK he used Blockchain's mixing service, but we don't expect the fees to be returned because it's impossible to identify the funds anyway. (Also Blockchain has offered a 0.5% bonus for those people who facilitated the laundering.)
The average price he sold at should be around $7.2, including the exchanging fees. At this price point we are short $42,000. I'll see if it's possible to get this from Chen Jianhai, but quite unlikely. I doubt the effectiveness of Chinese police as well, because he's very likely to have "Guanxi" to deal with his financial activities (which I can't decide whether legal or not). In any case, he has been acting in a very naive way and I assume he still has freedom today because of his guanxi, not technical sophistication.
I'm not sure about Bitcoinica's real solvency before the hack at the moment. The information is insufficient for me to give a definitive answer.
My 5,000 BTC is entirely separate from the hack, but it more or less covers a large part of the shortfall.
I'm trying to squeeze funds to see if I can compensate more personally, but I'm not in a very good financial condition. If NameTerrific is profitable in the future, I will be happy to contribute more personal funds to help Bitcoinica customers.