Quote from: sturle on May 03, 2014, 11:44:35 AM

Quote from: edmundedgar on May 03, 2014, 10:30:44 AM

You're being very optimistic about the powers of the audit there. That should be possible if Gox had reliable systems, kept thorough, accurate, comprehensive records, kept proper, archived backups and didn't tamper with any of the data, but do all those things sound likely to you? Bear in mind we're talking about people who didn't even keep their code in source control...

Did you see the leaks? We know we have logs of:
o Bank deposits and withdrawals (the banks keeps them for minimum 10 years, and can be checked against MtGox's records)
o Bitcoin deposits and withdrawals, to be verified against the blockchain.
o Every trade ever executed on MtGox.

There is a wildcard here. We don't know if all txids were saved in cases where a tx may be sent twice. If only the last one was saved, this may be a problem. It should still be possible to find those transactions using the spent outputs in MtGox's wallet.

This is enough to verify all balances. Finding the people who stole BTC and/or money is a case for the police, but this is separate from the audit.

I have one suggestion to Sunlot: Pay out all BTC balances of 1 BTC or less than BTC in full at once. This will get rid of 61840 creditors at a cost of maximum 7848 BTC (3.9% of the total amount of BTC), and I assume this will simplify dealings a lot. You could do the same with users having less than the equivalent in fiat, and get rid of most of the rest at a similar cost. (Cost will probably be lower, because most people's balances are less than the cost of withdrawing.) Or is having as many owners as possible in Sunlot's interest?

Presumably the banking data should be OK but as far as the bitcoins go there are all kinds of uncertainties. You've got some logs, that may have been tampered with by hackers, insiders or both, created by software that is known to be broken in at least one serious way, resulting in the huge hole that you mention. You may well not have the software versions that wrote the logs, so you can't even tell _how_ it was broken. Wallets may or may not have been lost or deleted - who knows?

They may turn out to have surprisingly good records that will make it easy to follow the money, but the idea that you can be _confident_ that they did isn't credible.