I don't know how profitable you guys think the trading fees are; they can't just simply "cover" $5 million USD seized by the FBI and continue to pay their normal operating expenses...
I don't know their level of actual expenses but I do know that in business your expense is a sliding scale; the more you make, the more it costs to stay in business... Financial exchanges operate on less than 1% Net Profit per year after all is said and done...
Let's just run a little financial simulation for speculation purposes. These are the conditions:
- Assume you need to pay off $5 million USD and still have enough for regular operating expenses.
- Assume you can operate at a 90% Gross Profit after operating expenses. (On average, for Every $111 of Gross Income you spend $11 on regular Operating Expenses leaving $100 left over.)
- Trade commission is 1.2% total for each transaction.
- All debts rely on new incoming USD as the older pre-existing accounts were forfeited.
To become solvent:
$5,000,000.00 (Gross Profit) = [$504,583,333.33 (Volume of Trade) * 1.2% (Trade Commission)] - $1,055,000.00 (Normal Operating Expenses @ 90% Gross Profit Ratio)
Net Profit @ 1% of Gross Income (not Gross Profit) = $60,550.00 per year.
It would take 82.5 years to cover the loss at that pace. If the volume of trade would bump up to say, $5 Billion it would be 8 years, and at $50 Billion would take 0.8 years...
Most financial exchanges deal with Hundreds of Billions of Dollars per year in volume... 1% start's to look pretty good there.
On top of all this; enough new USD will need to be transferred in monthly just to cover the expenses in order to stay in operation until they have enough time to recover. Even if old accounts are traded back and forth so rapidly that the volume of trade was a trillion Gox Bux they still wouldn't have any USD to spend unless it's transferred in from outside of the exchange.
Regardless of how they choose to apportion the minimal amount of USD transferred into Gox's account daily they are probably insolvent and operating on borrowed time and money... They wouldn't likely be able to pay their obligations right now anymore than they could squeeze blood from a turnip.
It's not an insurmountable problem given enough time, very careful spending, and solid growth of Bitcoin... Unless the incoming USD deposits slow down...
Basically, they've been skating on very thin ice and when people stopped sending in USD and just sent Bitcoin it put them under tremendous financial pressure. They likely cover expenses by selling coins on other exchanges to compensate for the decrease in USD deposits...