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In a chess match, you cannot assume that the other player will do what
you would like him to do. You must assume that, at every move, he will do whatever he can that is best
for him. If he can take your queen, he will take it, no matter how much that upsets you. If he can checkmate, he will, even if that would be a PR disaster among you and your friends.
Same here. Doing a thorough and honest audit, distributing the 220'000 coins fairly to clients, starting a criminal investigation to find the other 600'000 coins and distributing them to clients -- that is what
you would like Sunlot to do; but that is completely irrelevant when trying to predict what they
will do. You must ask what they
can do -- ethical or not -- that will result in most money
for them. This includes telling lies, falsifying and omitting documents, making secret deals with anybody, etc..
(And then there is the issue of the two different criteria for distributing the coins, by final account balance or by input/output balance. Each choice is good for some clients but bad for others. Sunlot obviously has chosen which clients it likes the most.)
To set things clear, I could not care less about whether MtGOX clients get their coins back or not. What I want is that all the criminals involved in the MtGOX scam
and anyone who tries to help them get taken out of circulation and deprived of their money. Anyone who doesn't like being robbed should want that too.
I agree with you that we may want to consider this matter in term of what the new team can get away with, and that the new team will attempt to maximize their profits and get away with as much as they can get away with.
Regarding convicting criminals, there may or may NOT be proof of criminal activity, and accordingly, a better result may be to attempt to make whole as many customers as possible. We do NOT have enough information to make broad general statements to pursue one avenue at the exclusion of another, and we do NOT know the extent to which multiple avenues may be pursued simultaneously.