Look at the bright side, GOX will be the ultimate HODL coins. By the time anyone gets their coins they will be worth a million each!
Yeah... hahahahaha exactly.
So long as account holders get paid in bitcoin, even if they only get 1/10 of their original GOX stash in bitcoin, they might be
forced to become a whole hell of a lot richer than they would have otherwise had become from those coins because any "normal" person would have sold much sooner.
Sure, self-sovereignty is a bit of a problem, even though the average trader does not tend to make money with such self-sovereignty when choosing to trade (which presumably much of the GOX coins were on the exchange because of a bit of a trading inclination), and also coin holder mortality could be a problem too, but the value of bitcoin is likely going to be much higher (and even well more than 10x higher) than the $100 to $1,200 BTC price range that was happening around the withdrawal freeze shenanigans that were taking place on GOX largely between mid-to-late 2013 and February 2014.
By the way, I personally got into bitcoin in November 2013, and I suppose that I was a bit spoilt because Coinbase was then available to me for the purchasing of bitcoins, so even though I was attempting to consider a variety of ways that I could possibly get coins and even to put coins on exchanges to have liquidation options, my radar was up about GOX throughout my first three months in Bitcoin, but I remember, too, how GOX was starting to lose market share and influence during that time, but also that the vast majority of active bitcoiners considered GOX going under (the way that it did) to be way too far beyond the pale. I suppose that sentiment that GOX was not going to go under or that it was coming back was reflected in the secondary market that developed for folks to trade their shares on GOX in the several weeks during the initial closure, which for a decent period of time, prices of those shares in GOX coins still seemed to garner more than 10% of an actual bitcoin..... and also, a decent number of people still were sending dollars to GOX in February 2014 in a hope to buy bitcoins when the Gox coins were selling for around $100 and the remainder of the market was trading BTC for around $600.