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Comment by downandout | Hacker News Reader

This is a fantasy. Mark is quite likely going to jail for a very long time, along with at least some of his fellow staff members. At market value they are something like $400 million in debt.

This ridiculous idea that the world can't live without Mt. Gox, which has been clearly communicated in both this document and the previously leaked crisis memo, shows signs of serious narcissism in whomever is behind them. Whatever PR/political damage their crisis has inflicted upon Bitcoin has already been done and could not be reversed even if they were saved. These executives should spend more time trying to find non-extradition countries that will take them and less time living in fantasy land.

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You can't go to jail for losing $400 million, you can go to jail for stealing it. You are implying that he has committed a some real crime beyond incompetence?

Depends on which theory or report we accept as truth at the moment, but it also sounds like there could be negligence involved - and that can be prosecuted.

I'm sure there are some AG's and Prosecutors frothing at the mouth right now to get there hands on Mr. Karpeles.

Edit: Even if the judicial system doesn't get MK... his life is probably ruined at this point if he cannot recover the funds - either because of reputation or personal safety. Bitcoin is the Wild West and there seem to quite a few shady and nefarious actors within the community.

You can't for incompetence, but you sure as hell can for fraud.

Incompetence that borders on negligence can certainly be prosecuted.

Negligence that leads to bodily harm, ya; but negligence that leads to monetary losses is probably a civil rather than criminal matter. It depends on the jurisdiction for sure, some developing world countries might see it as criminal.

losing the money was not the crime, trying to cover it up and engage in dubious practices like using customer fiat funds to shore up your company, buy btc (on gox at $150) to sell on other exchanges (bitstamp at $500) is likely to be the root of their legal woes not that they wer ehacked and lost 750k coins.

Their cover up is what will bring legal repercussions.

That sounds plausible. If they did cover it up, then I can see fraud charges. But if they were just stupid...

I have no idea how accurate this is, but Mark seemed to believe they were "operating within the law":

"Karpeles replied that the matter is “confidential,” adding that the company had discussed its business model with Japanese authorities “to ensure that we are operating within the law here.”"

> At market value they are something like $400 million in debt

I haven't followed that closely because I don't particularly care about MtGox aside from popcorn value, but I'm not sure how you would know that from the information that's currently public. As far as we know we kind of think we know the number of bitcoins they lost, but not the amount of cash/btc assets they still have.

Or did I miss something?

mostly the numbers are coming from this "leaked" document. whether it's authentic or not is a separate issue.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/209050732/MtGox-Situation-Crisis-S...

look at the "financial assets and liabilities" section.

32,430,000 usd + 2,000 btc held, vs 55,000,000 usd + 744,408 btc owed.

Oh right, so if those numbers are correct they're heavily insolvent even if they somehow managed to write off the btc owed. I'd been wondering about that.

This starts to remind me of the whole SCO vs Linux thing.

This document seems like fairly conclusive evidence that they've lost access to >700,000 bitcoins, because there's no reason for them to spend time putting together the document otherwise.

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