gox has been making 500k profit per day for years.
Is that right?
According to bitcoincharts, the average trade volume there was (very roughly) 10 M$/day from March to May 2013, 20 M$/day in December, 10 M$/day in November and January. It may have been 1 M$/day for the rest of 2013 and 2014, and practically nothing before that.
What are their trading fees? Are they applied to all clients?
If their commission is 0.5% on all transactions, then in Dec/2013 they may have made 100 k$/day, but perhaps only 10 k$/days on the average since Jan/2013.
On the other hand, if they make 500 k$/day, as you claim, then their clients must be trading 200 times as much, that is 100 M$/day; and the sum of all their account balances must be much larger than that, perhaps 1 G$.
Either way, their revenue from fees must be a small fraction of the total amount they owe to their clients (M + N above).
But why don't
they give us these numbers? It would be a first step towards restoring the confidence of their clients and of the rest of the world.
it's simply impossible to lose that much money in such a short amount of time. [...] no one is that stupid. no one.
I can think of three ways, not totally implausible, that they could have lost most of their clients' coins without people outside realizing it. And theft is
not one of them.
Look at other classical collapses - Enron, Worldcom, Lehmann Brothers, Madoff... They all seemed "too big to fail", and yet...