NOTE: Ignore this topic for the time being, sorry
So here is an explanation of:
1) What has happened on Sunday
2) Why a rollback is the only right call

I've decided to put this in a seperate topic so that this information can reach a slightly larger audience.

Here is what happened on Sunday 19th of June
All of the following buy orders got executed on Sunday 19th of June, causing the price to crash from $ 17.51 to 0.01 $ in a minute
http://pastebin.com/J0HXBjWu

Now, it's simple.
Count the amount of coins that people wanted to buy in the range from $ 0.01 up to $ 17.51
The only way that the market price can go down to $ 0.01 is that all these buy orders had to be cleared.
In order to clear all these buy orders, a total of 51 million bitcoins had to be sold by someone.
This is what happened on Sunday.
Someone sold almost 51 million bitcoins at MtGox, causing the execution of all these buy orders, all the way down to $0.01

But today only 6,6 million bitcoins truly exist. Nobody has 51 million bitcoins, and nobody will ever have 51 million BTC as you all must know...

That explains the question:
Was it a real trade? Where the trades real? Answer: no

What was it then?
Answer: A software exploit. This could have happened on many different levels. It could've been a SQL Database attack, it could've been an exploit in the website code itself, etc....

Banks
This happens in real banks as well, when a programmer has made an error in the code of transactions. A programmer could've written a bug in the software the causes money to get credited from account A, but not debited on account B.
If such a bug occurs in banks, they will always perform a rollback. A rollback will undo all the incorrect transactions up untill before the bug.
If they wouldn't do that, then money is being created out of nothing, or money is being deleted into nothing. In such a case, a rollback is always necessary.

This is why MtGox needs to do a rollback. This is why MtGox's single correct answer on the situation is a rollback.

"I did a great deal at $0.015 !! It's my right to keep them !!"
For all those who think they have done awesome deals between $ 0.01 and $10.00 and are now being ripped off by MtGox because of the rollback. Sorry folks, but you bought something that didn't exist. Nobody was truly selling bitcoins at $ 0.01
So you didn't buy bitcoins at $ 0.01
MtGox doesn't rip you off.

I hope this post helps.

JonasKohlheim

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