Quote from: cafminer1 on January 11, 2015, 12:43:59 PM

Good (old) comments, which stand out from other 1000+ posts topics.

Makes me think:
- 650K fake BTC bought with fiat by bots
- 200K real BTC, belonging to real, honest users
Seems good proportion in this case.

Now it would only take good investigation to put bots 650K bitcoins apart and use the 200K BTC to give back users BTC to the last penny.

Thanks. Actually, I was trying to suggest quite the opposite:

- 650K real BTC bought with nonexistent fiat by bots (essentially borrowed, since they were put on plastic), and then sold by whomsoever controlled the bots to the general public during the big November, 2013 run-up. The disappearance was originally called a "massive theft" in court papers. The language has slowly been shifting to now saying it was a case of "fraud." A subtle difference perhaps, but it would fit if someone had rigged Mt. Gox to sell bitcoins short against its terms of service, and then was permitted to cover the short sales at some later date. Perhaps the cover has been ongoing during this past year and is now almost to a point of completion.

The original idea may have been to quietly replace the "borrowed" (and then sold at peak prices) bitcoins with other bitcoins later bought up on the cheap after the crash. That's how short sellers profit. However, closing the doors on Mt. Gox may have foiled the short and exposed what he was doing by preventing quiet repayment of the borrowed coins.

If true, all this was a carefully planned scheme going well beyond simple fraud. I have written more about it in this thread (especially see the FAQ - Post #6):

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=615261.0

It might be worth exploring who has the ability to pull something like this scheme off and how do they expect to get away with it.

Covering up while the short(s) finish covering their "borrowed" bitcoins could help explain the reason for the atmosphere of secrecy surrounding the bankruptcy proceedings as duly noted by Kolin Burges in his report on the second creditor's meeting in Tokyo: http://www.mtgoxprotest.com/ For example, if the Mt. Gox addresses were released it wouldn't take very long to figure out what really happened. Yet, trustee Kobayashi has stated "disclosure of the address is withheld."