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Comment by pampa | Hacker News Reader

In this case, it is not Mt. Gox who is stealing money, it's the US government.

That's like saying "The government stole my car from the valet who was driving it without a license". Mt.Gox knew they needed a license, that's been made extremely clear. The only reason they are still operating at all is because Japanese authorities are asleep at the wheel.

If it's like you say, then people are supposed to go to the government to recover their funds. Unfortunately, govt won't give them a cent. It's like you live on a street where mafia requires valets to "buy" a license. You happen to give your car to a valet who forgot to "buy" a license from mafia. Then mafia seizes your car from the valet and you get upset. Why blame the valet if it's better to not have a mafia in the first place?

Oh, I forget. Mafia dictates what's good for your health and educates your children because it gives you a great service: protection against other mafias. And the price for that service is not fixed. You have to give up half of your income.

My point was not whether they were "stealing" their money, it's that they weren't an entity you should be trusting with substantial amounts of money. Whether they lost it by malicious action, inept accident or by themselves being stomped on by some larger entity (the government in this case), it was/is foolish to trust an organization like Mtgox with lots of your money.

It's kind of impressive that they can just lose 5 million like that and go on doing business. Actually I don't know if impressive is the word I was looking for...

They claim that they've made around $9M in fees this year, so in theory they can probably swallow a $5M loss.

As long as some portion of that $5M eventually goes towards licensure and bonding, or is returned, I'm counting it as forward progress to have that money seized.

I don't know the likelihood of that honestly but I would certainly be more ashamed of my own government than already this month if it was simply "appropriated" and not returned or counted.

Look at their fees and trading volume, you'll see why right away. They are/were killing it.

Hardly. They make about 1% of their volume. At 20K volume (about what they see these days), and $120/BTC, That's about $24,000 a day in revenue, half of which is USD. About $4.3M a year in USD. They just had $5M locked up.

They're surviving because they're not letting go of any of the USD they have, or at a trickle. I've heard numbers along the lines of they had $10M in April. They can't pay salaries and infrastructure costs in BTC, so they're holding on to what $ they have for as long as they can. Eventually they'll have to start releasing their BTC into the market to get $ out, but they know that will have a negative effect.

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