... of volatility, of course ...

Lula was a mechanics worker who did not finish high school.  When he was elected president he got to manage a financially broken country with humongous public debt.  The only bright spot was the new currency (real) which had been created to end hyperflation (more precisely, to exchange it for hyperindebtment)  and had managed to lose "only" 50% of its value wrt the dollar in the previous four years.  To get elected he had to pledge that he would not default on the public debt, nationalize the public companies that the previous neocon president had donated to friends privatized, or break the real.

To everybody's surprise he managed to do all that and still do a lot of his party's socialist agenda, such as improve the standard of living of the poorest, raise the minimal pay, open over a 100 new public universities, improve state health care, etc.  As a result the economy boomed, he was relected, and he ended with a 80% approval -- including from big industry and commerce sectors.  His biggest feat was in 2008, when the international financial crisis struck the world.  Instead of following the neocon/IMF recipe -- "cut social spending and give the taxpayers money to the failed private banks" -- he had the state banks to give cheap loans to industries directly, on condition that they did not fire any employees and did not cut pay.  As a result Brazil simply did not feel the 2008 crisis at all.  Leaders around the world openly praised him for that -- but did not dare imitate him, of course.

Lula's  popularity was such that he got to make his successor, the first woman president in our history.  She was his Energy minister an totally unknown at the time, bypassing (and upsetting) many party elders.  Now, when a strong man picks his successor, the result is usually a disaster, because he usually chooses a yes-man who is actually unable to lead.  Although Dilma was not as charismatic as Lula, she turned out to be a strong leader by herself and quite able to navigate the politics without relying on Lula. 

Dilma is well-intentioned and capable, but she has however three things going against her. First, she has an economics degree, and therefore does not understand economics as well as Lula did.  In particular, she seems unable to understand any goal that cannot be expressed in money terms.  For example, Lula's minister of Culture had started a reform of the copyright legislation that would include the notions of fair use and of public domain works.   Dilma's minister on the other hand was just a prop for the record industry, and tossed those plans as soon as she took office.  Apparently Dilma did not understand that "culture" is not measured by the profit of the publishers...

Dilma also tries to be nice to the media establishment.  Lula completely ignored them, never gave exclusive interviews or hobknobbed with media tycoons, stopped reading newspapers after being elected, and even prohibited his ministers from mentioning news in cabinet meetings.  He also ordered a redistribution of public advertising budget to favor small local newspapers and radios instead of the big conglomerates.  The big media hated him for that and did all they could demonized him, but to no avail.  I personally admire him most for that.  Dilma however does not seem to have his nerve; she undid this distribution policiy in part, has granted some exclusive interviews, and has appeared on big-time TV, in Oprah-like shows and panels. All in vain, because the media still hates her as much as they hated Lula.

Finally, Dilma (like Obama) does not have the personal public support that Lula had, and therefore she has to cede to her party, and to the allied-but-not-friendly parties in her coalition, in many ways.  She had to put up with many thoroughly incompetent ministries because of that. 

Besides big media, Dilma also got the hatred of the big banks, because she tried to lower he prime rate to something slightly less than obscene.  Media and banks led the campaign against her re-election (and the black bloc vandalism before the World Cup, which they tried hard to sabotage).  Yet she managed to barely win a second term, because (thank God) the opposition candidate was a disaster, detested even by his own party.

Besides the media and banking opposition, she has now also has to cope with the OPEC oil dumping and with a record El Niño drought, which will badly hurt the country's finances.  Let's hope for the best...

TLDR: Anyway, having lived under both neocon and socialist-Keynesian governments, I am now all for the latter, sorry.  I cannot understand how any country could believe that "austerity" is a good thing.  I would vote for Lula and Dilma again if I could.  I hope that the new Greece government can be as successful as Lula's -- in spite of not being led by a semi-illiterate mechanics worker...

Note that is is not an "explanation", just a "theory".  Precise language is preferable.    Many others are possible, but this one seems more likely to me.

The boundaries of theft and fraud are kinda fuzzy, and they often overlap.  I could say that buying bitcoins from customers with non-existent money was fraud, taking possession of those coins was theft.

In that theory, the CNY from the sale of those coins may have been confiscated by the Chinese government, may be sitting in an account of a Chinese exchange, may have been withdrawn by Willy's owner or by an accomplice.  In the latter case, the money may be in possession of any person involved, in CNY or laundered into other currencies.

In that theory, at least one of the Chinese exchange managers must have been aware of the massive transfers from MtGOX.  However, at the time it probably looked legitimate arbitrage.  The fault was that the arbitrager stole the coins from MtGOX clients, instead of buying them with real dollars; and the Chinese need not have been aware of that.

From the perspective of the Chinese government, during Nov/2013 the amateur Chinese traders imported at least a million  totally unproductive pieces of nothing, without going through customs, and were about to pay the equivalent of half a billion dollars or more in CNY to foreign sellers.  Obviously the PBoC must have been extremely unhappy about that.  So, in my mind it is not unlikely that one of the goals of the December decrees was to block this sizable leak in their national trade balance and prevent that pile of CNY from leaving the country.

Could that be worse than mistaking a blackberry for a Blackberry, trying to send an SMS with it, and getting the fingers all stained and sticky?

The report explains it: Willy, or a robot that behaved very much like it, started selling BTC instead of buying BTC, apparently after the price crashed.

In my theory, that would be expected: Willy was doing arbitrage between MtGOX and some Chinese exchange, and the Chinese exchanges were leading the price.  Then willy should buy while the price was rising (because the price in China would be higher than at MtGOX) and sell while the price was crashing (when China was lower).

My guess is that, during the rally, Willy had been buying real BTC with non-existing USD.  The owner hoped to get the CNY out for China at a later time, and fill the USD hole in MtGOX's accounting (with profit) before anyone noticed. Later, during the crash, the reversed Willy would have been selling non-existent BTC (since the real ones had been already sold in China) for USD in the client accounts.  Although these were mostly nonexistent USD, the trades still made sense because they reduced the size of the USD hole that Willy's owner would have to fill, whicle creating a BTC hole of a somewhat smaller value  (because of the China-MtGOX spread).

But (still my guess) the CNY were not taken out of China, either intentionally or due to some snag (the PBoC decrees, default by the Chinese accomplice, whatever). So MtGOX was left with huge BTC and USD holes, an the rest is history.

Beware about putting too much weight on the "Willy report" by that investigative firm.  It is entirely based on the leaked database, which was copied by parties unknown sometime before the final collapse.  We do not know whether the leaked copy is reliable; it may have been doctored and leaked specifically to shift the attention away from the real facts and culprits.  Indeed, we now know that the copy that the police got from the servers was incomplete (or worse).  The leaked database included records of deposits and withdrawals, but the firm has no way of checking whether those records match the actual deposits and withdrawals. In particular, AFAIK the blockchain addresses that received the BTC widthrawals were not leaked. (The police has bank records, and should have those addresses, hopefully.)

Isn't it amusing that the Freedom Loving ancap bitcoiners post mainly to command other users to ignore and don't reply to this and that? 

(Myself, I can ignore people on my head.  I don't see why one needs a computer to do that.)

Was King Uther Pendragon an utter expert, an udder expert, or an uðer expert?

Do we have six confirmations yet? 

Well, he hasn't confiscated them, just nationalized them.   Which may be the first step to siphoning money out of them, but also may protect them from madoffitis or lehmannbrodosis. 

(In my 20s I contributed for several years to a private pension fund that eventually goxxed.  A few years ago the neocon governor of the State of São Paulo privatized the state workers' pension fund, which among other things means less transparency and accountability, and less obligation for the state in case the fund sinks, and put his cronies at the helm.  So, frankly, I do not feel much about Morales's move, either way.)

You are right... just because there were 20 or 30 times when that happened last year, it does not mean that it will happen again. 

http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/19/stripe-finally-launches-support-for-bitcoin/
Stripe finally launches support for Bitcoin

Could this be the reason for the current rise?

http://blog.coinbase.com/post/111474738632/dell-expands-bitcoin-acceptance-to-uk-and-canada

EDIT: Oops, no rise?

http://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/fsnews/2015/fs_dwolla.htm
Treasury announces partnership with digital wallet providers PayPal, Dwolla for online payments

Ahem, it is not very relevant for the Chinese gamblers at Huobi and OKCoin, is it?

Looking for advice about women is a sure sign that you are not ready to cope with the concept yet.

The site mtgox.com is now managed by the trustee.  The claim filing instructions should be posted there sometime before May/25.

That estimate is based on the assumption that (your claim) = (your account balance sometime in early 2014).  Which may not the case at all.

Even discounting all the expenses,  I expect that the trustee will distribute a substantial fraction of the 220'000 remaining BTC, which will be maybe 20% of the sum of all BTC account balances at the time of the collapse.

However, it is still not known for certain that he will be able to distributed the BTC as BTC, or whether he will have to auction them and pay all claims in JPY.

It is also unclear how the victims' claims will be computed.  Most victims seem to assume that their claims are just their account balances.  However, that does not seem to be the standard criterion in such cases (and it may be unfeasible because the account database cannot be trusted).

The standard criterion seems to be (claim) =  (amounts deposited) - (amounts withdrawn), with BTC deposits and withdrawals converted to JPY by the market price at the time of transfer.   Deposits and withdrawals should be easier to validate than trades inside the exchange, or final balances. 

Obviously the two criteria will give vastly different results.  Whether the coins are returned in BTC or JPY is irrelevant, compared to this issue.   However, it seems that the victims cannot (or do not want to) understand that there are these two options, and no one has asked the trustee which one he is likely to follow. 

The victims will have to explicitly file their claims until 2015-05-25.  The trustee will then have to validate the claims, and should define the pay-outs by 2015-09-25.  However, the trustee still hasn't defined the rules and methods for filing claims.

It is quite possible that many victims will not bother to file a claim, or that their claims will be less than their account balances.  Perhaps the total claims will be substantially less than the total balances, in which case each victim who files a claim would recover a higher percentage of it.

Are you aware that the trivial anagram of "sacred cow" is "sacred cow"?

There may be even more bidders this time, but it does not mean that the price will be higher.

In auctions of other stuff, there are often "bargain hunters", who bid well below market; their chances are low, but if they win they can make a good profit by re-selling immediately. 

Interest may have been low for the second auction because the first one was grabbed by Tim Draper, probably at close to market. The bargain hunters  must have assumed that the same would happen in the second auction, so they did not bother to bid.  But the outcome of the second auction (fewer bidders, winner was a syndicate of small bidders), and the general perception that Tim Draper made a bad deal, suggests that the next one may close well below market.  So the bargain hunters may show up en force now.