Quote from: americanpegasus on August 02, 2015, 11:48:43 PM

Quote from: smooth on August 02, 2015, 11:36:38 PM

Quote from: dEBRUYNE on August 02, 2015, 09:02:45 PM

You should both read this comment -> https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3fe92x/im_ashley_barr_aka_adam_turner_the_first_mtgox/cto1383

I definitely think the next comment has to be true if the willy bot scenario is true https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3fe92x/im_ashley_barr_aka_adam_turner_the_first_mtgox/ctor4f3

It's basically this, which was very insightfully written at the time:

Quote from: Peter R on March 02, 2014, 10:01:28 PM

Peter Rs Theory on the Collapse of Mt. Gox

TL/DR: A young man had a secret. To keep it hidden, he kept digging until the hole was a billion dollars deep. This is a speculative tale of a great bitcoin theft from MtGox in 2011 and the efforts that this man undertook to fix it. The tale explains the bitcoin bear market of 2011, the explosive rally of 2013, delayed fiat withdrawals, malled transactions, and a bot named Willy.

Holy mother of God. This is it. This makes sense.

I don't know why I suddenly and instantly believe this theory, but it fits all the pieces so perfectly.

...

I used to think some variant of Peter R's theory made the most sense. What I could never quite reconcile, though, was that there was no blockchain trail of stolen coins in 2011. So I figured that maybe the 2011 hack involved the hackers copying a bunch of code, finding exploits a while later (or having installed a backdoor), and then slowly bleeding Gox in relatively small amounts over the years.

But honestly, reading that Ashley Barr thread makes me think that the whole thing more likely has a far simpler explanation; ie, Karpeles just spent a few million of the fiat deposits that came into the bank account (which was his personal account(!)) frivolously, while crediting traders with BTC. Given prices at the time (mid-2011 through 2012), it would only have taken <$5m in lavish "corporate" spending to run up ~550,000BTC in liabilities. Unfortunately there's a long history of startups proving that it's not hard to blow a few million bucks on dumb stuff.