Well, some 650'000 bitcoins that were supposed to be there just weren't there at the end.  A crime surely happened, the only questions are which kind, how, when, by who, etc..

Mark claimed it was a theft, but AFAIK he has not provided any details (the thesis of the "malleability bug" has been disproved), failed to tell the police as soon as he noticed it, and did not tell the clients until after closing the site.   I hope the law will find the right label for his actions.

I think it is fairly certain that the owners were trading at their own exchanges,  against their clients.  Why would they not do it?

Re the Willy report:  Is this the moment in the animated cartoon when the guy is about to realize that he has stepped off the cliff and has been standing on thin air for a while?   

Amazing... 

If you were willing to write a master thesis on that, I could be your advisor.  Or, better, on the exam committee.

Does this plot include the Chinese exchanges? All of them?

I am sure you wanted to add "without a specific controlling authority".  For those three qualities you listed, one does not need the complexity and expense of the bitcoin protocol.  (Is that what Ripple is/was about?)

With "ownerless" thrown in, it is certainly an exciting concept.  Let's see whether it (a) can remain ownerless and (b) widely accessible without advanced hacker tricks.  Those are two of the things that I am very skeptical about.

By some accounts, paranoid maybe, Brock Pierce may be planning to "own" bitcoin, as  he practically owned the real-money market for virtual game money with his previous company (IGE). AFAIK, Bitcoin is now efectively run by a few industrial miners (not sure that is what Satoshi had in mind), and one of them (KnC) seems to have close ties to him.   In any case, the formation of a mining cartel or even a monopoly seems to be a non-negligible risk.

I don't know of any country that has banned bitcoin outright (er, what did Russia and India do, exactly?), but China and several others have banned its use in commerce and finance, and severely restricted its speculative trade.  Even the US, that otherwise seems to be bitcoin-friendly, has put many restrictions for its use in their own soil.  (A telegraphic tinfoil-hat interpretation of the US stance could be: the CIA wanted it, the NSA designed it, the FBI loved it, the IRS promptly taxed it, and the SEC said 'OK, fine, as long as American citizens are not induced to invest in it'.  )

Darn. I knew that I should have removed those double spaces after punctuation.

It is time to reveal where the fundamental idea of bitcoin mining was born:
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=990536
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplexity
 

Well, they are already stored here for posterity. And signed with my real name even.   

Who knows?  These well-separated buying spurts smell like insider trading to me.  Some Chinese traders got news that made them want to buy well above market.  Others see the price rising and just follow along.  Still others are diffident and take time to raise their bids. 

Dear @shmadz, thanks for the offer and the suggestion, but I will rather pass for now.  All the best.

3600 CNY was the price on March 26, just before Caixin leaked the PBoC's "strenghtening" directive.

It is as if that directive did not exist.  Perhaps the end of leveraged trading and other monkey business compensated the new hurdles for moving CNY into the exchanges?

Is the SilRoad.com address in Tokyo perchance close to MtGOX's old offices?

MtGOX: Round Cross 5F, Shibuya 2-Chome-11-6, Shibuya-ku Tokyo, Japan 150-0002
http://numismatics.pwnz.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Exclusive-License-Agreement-Reduced.pdf

SR: JR Ebisu Building 11F 1-Chome-5-5 Ebisuminami, Shibuya-ku Tokyo, Japan 150-0022
http://www.silkroad.com/fr/Societe/Nos-bureaux.html

IIRC, Shibuya is a favorite section of Tokyo for technology companies, so that probably does not mean anything.
Adrresses in Japan are a complicated thing, I was not able to locate them for sure with Google Maps.

Looking at the 1m charts, it seems to me that this last spurt began in China at 4:50 UTC (12:50 afternoon local time). Within 1 minute it was repeated at Bitstamp and Bitfinex, only a couple of minutes later reached BTC-e and Coinbase.  Check?

Too bad that bitcoinwisdom does not provide intervals shorter than 1 min.  Perhaps someone could check the transaction logs to confirm Huobi x Bitstamp.

Not true, of course.  Bitcoin is not MtGOX.  MtGOX was just one of hundreds of scams that bitcoin made possible.

The media is not in a "FUD campaign against bitcoin".  Bitcoiners are unbeatable in that regard.  Look at The Bitcoin Foundation, better called The Shrem Karpeles & Friends foundation, electing Brock Pierce to the all-powerful
board of directors.  No reporter could make that up.

Two very bad things happened to bitcoin that will kill it. One is its adoption by "libertarians" who (naively) saw in it a weapon to destroy government and allow unrestricted trade of illegal items like drugs and weapons.  The other was the opening of the Chinese market, that caused the huge spike in the price, that in turn attracted all sort of financial scammers selling bitcoin as a lucrative and safe investment to unwary investors.  Bitcoin will die before it can get rid of those pests.

Could be, but may not be...

The hair is black in the first photo, GGB's is grayer.
GGB's eyebrows are tapered, the first guy's seem to be more even.
GGB's cheeks are rather full, the top guy's do not seem to be.

I see that the top photo is from Silk Road Technology and labeled "France Team"
http://www.glassdoor.com/Photos/SilkRoad-Technology-Office-Photos-E34709.htm

Come on, the joke is revealed (and justified) only on page 2 of the thread.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=621770.msg6891010#msg6891010
Thumbs up for those who were so shocked at the original post that they felt the urge to reply right away.

Methinks that is giving too much importance to MtGOX.  Even when it seemed to be doing well, it was just a small business, comparable in revenue to a medium-size supermarket, but with far less capital assets (that it owned, not that it was merely the depositor of). According to the plan that Mark drew up when trying to sell the company, its revenue from fees in 2013 varied between 1 and 4 million USD/month, and its total profit in 2013 was a mere 286'000 USD http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/02/leaked-just-before-bitcoin-catastrophe-mtgox-dreamed-of-riches/

After its collapse, MtGOX became just a small defunct business.  Its demise was a catastrophe for the bitcoin community, but was hardly noticed outside it.

The mere disappearance of 500 million USD in funds that the clients thought that they had shows that a major crime was committed.  Marc may have been a victim of a hacker; but there is no proof of that, only Marc's word, and he has not offered a plausible explanation of how the hack was carried out.  On the other hand, his behavior in the final days is not above reproach -- to put it very, very mildly.

I am not sure what aspect of that battle you are referring to.  But the British were still in the middle of a war, thy had not capitulated yet.  Reviving MtGOX sounds more like those film plots where some secret neonazi group tries to clone Hitler and create the Fourth Reich. 

Clarifying my last comment: the loss of MtGOX did not leave a void to be filled, because any former MtGOX clients who wished to continue trading could do so at any of the other exchanges.  Any special features of that site could be replicated by another company without it having to assume the negative aura of being the "MtGOX 2.0"

An old but interesting article about Brock Pierce and the virtual money market, pre-bitcoin:
The Decline and Fall of an Ultra Rich Online Gaming Empire
By Julian Dibbell   2008.11.24
http://wolfblitzzer0.blogspot.com.br/2014/03/bitcoin-autumn-radtke-toxicology.html

Bitcoincharts.com shows Localbitcoin trades, for a dozen currencies separately.  I gathered their daily volumes for a while, but they did not add up to much.  Will try to repost the numbers later today or tomorrow.