I think you mean if they steal it. Mtgox today became officially Verisign secured, so it's approximately as secure as any other site on the Internet.
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The investors are free to come and go as they please. They can set their bid prices at any point they wish. They aren't required to agree to anything.
Verisign secured as in they have an https/ssl certificate? Or is that some kind of third party penetration test?
Read all about it. Google is the source of all worldly knowledge. The wikipedia page is just a primer on the topic.
Either way It doesn't mean a whole lot as many users are hacked on their end as well, and more sites like mybitcoin will popup and steal coins forever, it will never stop (until bitcoins are worthless).
Assuming those BitCoins never re-entered circulation, the price would go up. Assuming they re-entered circulation, the theft of them would have minimal long-term material effect on the price of BitCoin, or the value.
So WHEN not if, coins are stolen, an artificial price will maximiize their profits, instead of crashing the value like what should happen when a huge dump on the market occurs.
If someone stole all the BitCoins ever to be minted and sold them all the way to the lowest possible floor value, then yes. That would be quite a feat, however, since nearly 65% of them haven't been mined yet, and don't exist to be stolen. Furthermore, BitCoin isn't like cash - someone using those coins again leaves a record in the block chain that can be easily traced. I bet that over time we will see fewer and fewer BitCoin thefts as prosecution of it is far easier than prosecuting the theft of untraceable fiat cash.
The second quote makes no sense to me. If people are setting whatever prices they want, then you are describing the current system, not an "artificial wall value" system.
This point actually bears investigation. The system this bot creates is actually a hybrid of free market and artificial wall, falling closer to artificial wall in terms of application, but closer to free market in terms of user choice to participate. The purpose isn't to lock in a particular value, but rather to create a pooled backing of BitCoin which would help to move the price towards stability by creating a new indicator - approximate backing faith, let's call it, or ABF.
The current location of the ABF wall will act as a lower boundary to the market, since it cannot mathematically drop below that point, even though that point can move due to the amount of pooled purchasing power that determines the ABF wall being voluntary to participate in.
The longer ABF stays relatively stable, the more likely that the price moves towards the ABF wall.
As the price decreases towards the ABF wall, some players will back out of the bot, lowering the value of ABF, and therefore the price as measured in fiat. Others will leave the wall to buy BitCoins cheaply, raising the price away from the wall. Other still will back the wall more strongly to "brace for impact" as it were.
The stronger the ABF wall is, the more people are likely to bid near it than any other price point/range, regardless of whether or not they are using the bot. This adds non-bot users to the strength of ABF, and the closer they are to ABF, the more it strengthens it. If there's a $21,000,000.00 bid at $1.00 per BitCoin, it becomes silly to bid $1,000 at $2.00 per BitCoin unless you are trying to back a higher value than the ABF wall represents, trying to pay twice as much for your BitCoins, or speculating.