Quote from: dreamspark on March 03, 2014, 10:14:44 AM

Quote from: Rampion on March 03, 2014, 10:11:30 AM

So, IMO the big question is not "if" they knew they were short of customer's money because it is painfully obvious THEY KNEW, the big question is: WHERE DID THAT MONEY GO???

$5.5M are held by Department of Home Security (the "Dwolla situation") and $5.3M by Coinlab, that's clear. But where did the rest of the money go, as they are claming they have a hole of $22M? We need to factor in that they have made +$10M in trading fees during the last year, so in reality the missing money is at least $32M...

Crazy stuff, you really can't make this shit up.

This is one of the things I dont understand. Yeah okay missing bitcoins could be stolen etc, but where did all the cash go. I bet they received at least 2-3 million in fiat after they shut btc withdrawals and the price crashed. One guy on here sent 800k alone then there was the other guy who sent 55k. It beggars belief it really does.

I'd bet that the hole was caused by a a few things compounded together:

1) Bad management, eg. considering customer funds as "assets" and thus using them to cover operational expenses believing they would cover that up with fees later on (something similar to what they did by crediting customers accounts with money they did not held in reality as per the Coinlab situation). Maybe they even tried to do some arbitrage and they fucked up - what I know for sure is that incompetence should NEVER be underestimated.

2) Seizures by LE. We know for sure that DHS is holding $5M of Gox's customers money and that $5.3M are held by Coinlab. It doesn't look like there's more than that because in the leaked docs they clearly listed that money (DHS+Coinlab) as "assets", and there was no other entry for other money that could have potentially been held by other parties.

3) Outright stealing. Right now that seems more plausible to me than a few months ago. I always thought Gox was "basically honest", but after seeing their business plan it seems to me they were just a bunch of amateurs playing with third party money like it was their own - that's criminal negligence at best. They were operating an exchange but their accounting looks like the one of a bank, listing customer deposits as assets of the company, like they could use that money to cover their own expenses. That's crazy (and criminal) in my book. At this point I wouldn't be surprised they even took out dividends from the company at some point, while knowing they were running fractional and virtually bankrupt... And that's stealing.