Well, perhaps you are right about big banks and high finance.  But many smaller fish have been sent to jail for securities fraud and related crimes.

Madoff is in jail, some 25 people related to the Enron and Worldcom scandals were found guilty of criminal charges and some or all went to jail, ....

Perhaps MtGOX can be equated to Lehmann Bros and declared "too big to jail". But people who stole 1/10 as much should not deserve that privilege.  

EDIT: typos

People who are currently invested in bitcoin, big or small, have already reacted to MtGOX.  They may not have reacted to China yet, because it is not yet clear what effect the China develpments will have on the price.

On the other hand, for prospective investors, MtGOX, and the dozens of bitcoin-based businesses that ended in scams, thefts and failure, must still be very significant.  People who read or saw on TV that MtGOX swallowed half a billion dollars from customers -- including bitcoin experts -- will not easily forget that when the bitcoin salesman rings the door.  Especially when those people learn that such scams keep occurring, the lost bitcoins are never recovered, and no one gets punished.

The China situation is still uncertain.  No one has confirmed, but no one has denied, that the bank accounts will be closed by April 15.

The BTC price in china is rising now, meaning that the market's expectations may have become more optimistic.  However, since there have been no news that would justify a change of perspective, it may be just a false feeling. ("The plane has been falling for five minutes already, and we haven't crashed yet; I am starting to believe that the ground is just a rumor.")

I did not mean to imply that Neo&Bee was a Ponzi or other scam. I was just pointing out that 12,000 BTC is small in the scale of bitcoin scams/thefts/failures.

From what I have seen so far, I believe N&B was basically a bad business plan, badly executed.  That is, I think that Mr. Brewster really believed that it would succeed.

On the otehr hand, the IPO already had some questionable features (investor rights, trading venue, prospectus, ...).  And foul play often kicks in when businesses start to fail...

I can't dispute your analysis... but, would dare to give an explicit prediction --  xxx USD/BYC at time hh:mm?

12,000 BTC is 6,000,000 USD at current prices.  I would love to have that money, but in business terms it is small.  There must be (rough guess) at least 100,000 companies of that size in Europe, perhaps much more.

A small company in Cyprus is in trouble.  Why should that be featured by Bloomberg?

Here in Brazil we had a Bitcoin Ponzi (BitcoinRain) that ate some 15,000 BTC from clients.  It wasn't on Bloomberg either...

Wheyyy, amazing...

Dear bitcoiners, I am the heir of Sir Abdullah Nobobo, a Nigerian tribal chief who bought the Eiffel tower from Napoleon in 1943.  I am selling it for 12,000 BTC, interested buyers please stand in an orderly line outside my mailbox.

  <------- NOTE! This is a joke!

Chinese Slumber Method prediction for Monday April 07

Prediction valid for: Monday 2014-04-07, 19:00--19:59 UTC (not before, not after)
Huobi's predicted price: 2929 CNY.
Bitstamp's predicted price: 472 USD.


Plot legend

This last data point was again good (S = 0.0030, W = 0.835), and almost aligned with the previous three points. Therefore it seemed appropriate to stick with a straight trend line, defined by least squares on the last four Slumber points: A + B*(d-d0) where d-d0 is the number of days since Apr/03, A = 2670.77, B = 64.48.

The Bitstamp prediction, as usual, is the Huobi prediction divided by the currency conversion factor R, which was assumed to be 6.20 CNY/USD (it was 6.23, 6.20, 6.13 at the last three Slumber Times).
 
Checking the previous prediction

Prediction was posted on: Saturday 2014-04-05, 23:41 UTC
Prediction was valid for: Sunday 2014-04-06, 19:00--19:59 UTC (~19 hours later)

This was again an easy hit:

Huobi's predicted price: 2874 CNY.
Huobi's actual price (L+H)/2: 2860 CNY
Error: 6 CNY (~1 USD)

Bitstamp's predicted price: 466 USD.
Bitstamp's actual price (L+H)/2: 459 USD
Error: 7 USD
 
NOTE: If you lost money because you trusted my predictions, you made at least two big mistakes.

In November/December, before the PBoC decrees, he had 50-100 kBTC/day, almost the same daily volume in BTC that Huobi has now (and maybe more, if counted in USD or CNY).  Was he faking it then?

If the company goes bankrupt, its assets (including any remaining BTC, by logic) will be sold, and the money thus collected will be used to pay debts and the fees of bankruptcy lawyers and executors.

If there is any money left after that, presumably it would be distributed to the shareholders.  Is that correct?

In that case, the buy/sell price posted by a trader shoud reflect his expectation about the amount of money that may be distributed to investors.  Insiders obviously have an advantage there.

The CEO of a failing bitcoin enterprise may be tempted to take any remaining bitcoins for himself, since they are "virtual" and their accounting is more easily faked. Hopefully the bankruptcy executors/courts will be smart enough to prevent that.

(The "standard script" for failing bitcoin enterprises calls for a "hacker" supposedly stealing a good part of the bitcoins.  But that act has already been played out in this case, yes?)


 

Thanks for the clarification!

I understand that the details of his personal life are not relevant in general.  However, since he is not Cypriot himself (and does not speak Greek), it would have been relevant to know whether he chose Cyprus because it provided the best market/environment for Neo & Bee, or for purely personal reasons.

For how long had he been living in Cyprus before he launched the N&B project?

I learned only these days, through this forum, that Mr. Brewster's fiancée is Cypriot.  Is that true?

Assuminh it is, should we infer that, if his fiancée was Fijian instead, then Fiji would have been the best country for opening the first bitcoin bank?   

Something like that.  In fact the low volume means less "noise" (volatility) at that time.  For one thing, at those times the arbitrage traders can achieve equilibrium between China and the West, whereas during the day they are chasing a fast-moving target. 

I believe that arbitrage traders largely copy Huobi's price to the West during the day, because Huobi has better liquidity. However, when China is asleep, they sometimes copy a rising or falling Western trend to Huobi. On those days, the volume at the "slumber time" is higher than normal because of arbitrage, so the method will give low weight to those data points.

I don't knwo about "chain reaction", perhaps it suffices that enough traders decide on their own to "reset" their positions.


Since there have been no news or events that could cause a break in the underlying trend, the prediction still stands.  It may be voided if there will be significant trade around 03:00 am.
 
However, note that my predictions are intended only as a test the Method, not as advice to traders.  If you lose money because you trusted my predictions, you will have made at least two big mistakes. 

They are located in Hong Kong but cater to foreign clients only.  Their CEO has a French name, somewhere I read they had some Canadian investors.
http://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/1t9h2r/are_our_funds_safe_on_bitfinex_it_is_a_hong_kong/

Unbiased and informed? They say
Presumably this statement refers to Havelock resuming trading of the shares? 

The entire article seems to be an ill-digested collage of items found in forums, without order or any new information.

Moreover, my English is poor, but theirs is even worse...

Has anyone been able to talk to Mr. Brewster after he left Cyprus, either directly or through his lawyers (if he has any)?

PS. By the way, if you call Australia an "island" you will lose the sympathy of an entire continent. 

Hey, I didn't write that article, just thought you would want to know about it.

I agree that some of his "flags" are rather stupid.  But some are valid, like the lack of experience and overambitious discourse without a real business plan.

Five Red Flags that Preceded Neo & Bee's Collapse
http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/04/05/another-one-bites-the-dust-neo-bee/

PS. The point of the plot is to show the AVERAGE gain/loss PER YEAR over the last N days, rather than the accumulated gain/loss factor.

OK, but I am not suggesting anything, that is just data.

The sale date (Apr/01)  was not "picked"; it is basically "today", except that the datafile I had at hand was collected a few days ago.  I did this same plot a couple of months ago, and I may do it again in a month or so, in both cases using the then-current date and price.

What could be so dangerous in allowing users to upload ONLY a static jpeg image of bounded size?

It would be fine (good, even) to limit replacement of the avatar to once every 6 months or more, except by admin intervention and for non-vanity reasons.

The value of avatars is that readers can recognize the posters without having to read and memorize their usernames.  This value is negated if users keep changing their avatars.