Topic: Why I believe MtGox knows the leak for months / years (not "unnoticed") (Read 1253 times)

English is not my first language, unsure why do you think I am defending Karpeles. By speculating that Kerpeles knows it for a long time I painted him blacker.  I lost 100 bitcoins to him; there is no reason for me to defend him.

I am offering a view angle inside-to-out so you can look from "how bad it is" to "how it become so bad", which is necessary for investment judgements. e.g. you need to be able to tell a business is going bad before it does, and the way to obtain this insight is to look at bad event from how it formed, not only how it looked like outside. A cool speculator also have to analysis why the previous guess was wrong (e.g. "the leak canonot be too bad because it was only discovered 2 weeks, Gox will live") and I am doing that. You think this review is "in defense" of mark? Either I am experiencing a culture shock / unrefined expression or you are not that interested in speculating (the next event).

I agree with every point you made after "fool". The "fool" part I already explained: he was not foolish enough to not to notice the leak. He allowed the leak - for that we need a word better than 'fool', a word imply foolishness without 'dull' connotation - 'unwise' is too light. Kind English help is welcome. (Edit: my thesasaurs suggested "unscrupulous". Is it the right word?)

I also noticed I wrote that he has high self-esteem, was that an incorrect use? I meant to say he thinks himself important. To avoid further misunderstanding I added "that the world pay attention to his newly gained weight" right after it, so readers know I meant nothing positive with 'self-esteem' there. It indeed would help me by point out English misuses.

Stop defending Mark Klueless. He's a fool at best, and I'm being generous. He may have stolen millions of dollars from his customers and may be getting away with it. He has clearly abused the trust bestowed upon him by the bitcoin community. He has clearly violated the fiduciary duty he is obligated to fulfill. He has ZERO credibility at this point.

For me the best explanation is this one:

1. The leak was found months/years ago.

2. Declearing the situation begins the down fall of the business. Karpeles being a young enterpreneur who “Giving up is not a part of how I usually do things", thinks he can revert the situation. "I made millions, I could do it again, and the lose can be covered". He is in fact too young to judge situation by past experience; youngsters like him needs a mentor (many young enterpreneurs did get one)

3. Facing lack of liquidity, and unable to solve the leak without the risk of revealing code and cold fact to outside experts, he decideds South American can help him. Expansion towards South American both boost confidence and the new money postpone the revelation.

Mark is too young to be a good businessman and too smart to acknowledge it. There is a big ego acting, since being the CEO of the world 's leading bitcoin exchange has defined him so far. He was ambitious to start with: "my goal is world domination"(source: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304071004579407022025451070 even jokingly, a youngster's ambition is hard to hide)

I reason that the kind of misjudement (or hubris?) demonstrated in this paragraph can only be from a big ego:


Knowing the leak, MtGox would weight the 'stable and running' over the risk of exposing the problem, just like Chinese government. If it is ture now, it was since the leak was found, because MtGox had more market share then.

You may wonder how he gets to sleep everyday with this. This guilty feeling, the impulse to face the fact, doesn't apply to self-proclaimed genuines in their heights. When I run my first business (22 years old) my intelligence was superior in the small circle we had, and I decide that pedestrian concerns doesn't  apply to me. I was in a similiar situation burning my own money and I decide if I could make them in the first place I can do it again as easily, and sleep as soundly as usual. I too naïvely seek business expansion when it was failing. Man wasn't born with personal integrity, some has to suffer to build it. I did. Multiply this sensation many times for a smarter guy like him, I know Mark K. can manage to sleep well and live happily with his cat (except that he is leaking others' money) and to hide the fact away, thinking he is doing mankind a favor. In fact, he perhaps still have rather high "self-esteem", knowing that he is impacting the world by being able to weight different outcome of MtGox - and people pay atttention to his newly gained weight. You can hardly blame him for pure evil, because he lack grown integrity, for judging by age his is in the midst of building one. The mistake is that the world allowed too much stake on a young man like him.

It would be a mistake if you think his nonchalant attitude (showing cat etc) means the business is okay or he has a solution.

Next time when you seek to do business with a company, put more stake if the guy/woman is married (marrage teaches a lot), even more if he had bankrupted and maintained good relationship with former employees and clients. Tripple so if he endeavours difficulty and didn't turn to blame someone the moment when things go wrong.

Now, technically, I've been a tech engineer and I know it is possible that a bug in a complex system takes more than half a year to find or solve - especially if firefighting constantly takes away your focus, and especially the system was running all the time, and especially it is a single point of failure, and MtGox has all 3 characters. Such thing happened in other complex systems before. (Edit after reader assumed that I am defending Mark) this is not saying MtGox is forgivable, but to emphasize that Karpeles made a bad judgement to choose to hide it over exposing it to the experts. To blame it on lack of a grown personality integrity is better than to blame on lame tech. Mind it, if another CEO consider the essential of this event being bad programming skill, don't use his bitcoin services, because he too lack the personal integrity. Errare humanum esta, the way you treat it tells your integrity.