Quote from: sturle on May 11, 2014, 04:52:52 PM

trades were published in real time, and more or less complete records can be retrieved from many locations.

Is that true? I know some places where one can download chart data -- OHLC price and total volume, in 1-minute intervals. Do you know any place that saved the individual trades?

Quote from: sturle on May 11, 2014, 04:52:52 PM

The only unknown is which accounts the trades belonged to. Faking account balances afterwards by switching which account did the trade will require a lot of work to make everything match up, and even more to seem credible.

Obviously this proposal is not much concerned with credibility. Undecided

Seriously, if clients do not find the result of the Sunlot investigation convincing, what can they do? They will have only 16.5% equity at best, so they cannot prevail on management by vote.

People can fake Rembrandts and Hitler diaries well enough to fool many experts. With a computer, one could do amazingly complicated doctoring of the database. The stakes are much higher than the price of a Rembrandt.

Quote from: sturle on May 11, 2014, 04:52:52 PM

Not sure if it will be possible at all if everyone will be allowed to verify their own data. People have already been able to verify their balances for a while, and I haven't heard of an complaints. An audit will trivially reveal if the trade data matches the balances caused by deposits and withdrawals.

The doctoring need not alter other people's balances, only inflate those of certain "friends". As you pointed out yourself recently, there are many accounts with substantial BTC and/or money balances that have not had any activity for years. I cannot imagine who would "forget" hundreds of thousands of euros, unless the owner died or that money was "dirty" in some way. Some of those accounts could have been used to doctor the database -- e.g. by switching the balances of a dead account and that of a friend.

Money deposits and withdrawals can only be verified by obtaining MtGOX's bank accounts, many of them closed long ago. Bitcoin deposits and withdrawals cannot be verified independentlry without knowing the addresses used by MtGOX. It is not obvious that the new management will have access to those records -- all of them -- and they have no obbligation to release them -- all f them -- to the clients.

Moving the discussion to a higher level: the proposal implies that the clients will put their 800'000 BTC (the 200'000 that are there and the 600'000 that disappeared) and a lot of cash under control of certain people. It is extremely naive to trust that those people will do what they say they will do, without making sure that they will go to jail if they don't do it. This requires reading the proposal very carefully, keeping in mind that they may be dishonest (perhaps even the thieves themselves) and very smart. Namely, if there is a loophole that will let them take some or all of that money without going to jail, you must assume that they will use it.