Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: Mt. Gox's liquidation an its impact...
by
nuff
on 21/04/2014, 07:54:11 UTC

A liquidator cannot buy BTC since his job is to pay all fiat debts. BTC  isn't a currency in many countries.
So a BTC debt possibly has a lower (or zero) priority when liquidating.
Owning a BTC in Gox would be like having bought a product and payed upfront, you simply will never receive the product or your money.

Except that this 'product' also has the same characteristics that of a currency. It's fungible, has a price value and accepted by vendors in exchange for services and goods. They (the liquidators) will still need to find a way to deal with these 'product' that's worth about a hundred million dollars at least.

The fact that BTC is not officially recognized as a currency may be the big stumbling block for the legislators. Because it's not recognized as a currency, they can't redistribute those btc back as btc, they need to liquidate those btc to fiat, and only then can compensation take place, in the form of fiat as defined in bankruptcy laws. You always get a fire sale whenever a company goes down, the liquidators would want to as quickly as possible liquidate any assets they're able to get their hands on to pay back creditors.

This whole fiasco is unprecedented where there hasn't been any legal provision written yet to tell legislators what to do with this 'product'. What follows should be interesting, how the Japanese will handle this.