Quote from: smooth on August 03, 2015, 06:30:16 AM

Quote from: Melbustus on August 03, 2015, 05:56:07 AM

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.

One easy way to reconcile this is that the coins were not stolen but just lost: private keys erased with no usable backup, either by a hacker (vandalism) or by Karpeles himself (error).

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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.

In general terms the idea he spent the money is plausible but the low level specifics don't work. He would have had to credit them with phoney fiat, not BTC. Without some other fraud, this would not affect the balance of BTC on the exchange.

Yeah, remember how Mark suddenly found 200k coins and no one bought it? I think he actually did "just" find those coins. Word is the place was a mess.
Those coins might never be coming back.