Is there a link to that "favorable decision by the US court" about Savegox's plan?  (Not a news article, but the actual court paper?)
Thanks...

FWIW, there is a note on OKCoin's site, posted May/12 17:12 local time, that reports some bug that hit their site on May/11.  I understood (perhaps) that it was related to leveraged trading, and led them to stop leveraged trading. 

https://www.okcoin.com/t-1008713.html

Well, I don't know about other readers, but I am feeling a bit dizzy and quite nauseated. Yeech.

I have seen many claims that they buy off-market.

Well, there are many FBI agents dreaming of promotion, and the original SilkRoad was not enough for all of them. 

Seriously, I haven't paid much attention, but wasn't there a big hack/scam on SilkRoad 2.0 ?
http://beta.slashdot.org/submission/3340235/silkroad-20-hacked-all-bitcoins-stolen
http://bitcorati.com/forum/topic/silkroad-2-0-finally/

While the advantages of bitcoin for buying illegal drugs and guns may make bitcoin more popular among drug users, gun crazies, and mobsters, it is a negative feature for most everyone else, including potential investors and entrepreneurs.  Like the "election" of Brock Pierce to the board of the Shrem Karpeles & Friends Foundation...

PS. I must add that courts of law generally do not count "missing an opportunity of some hypothetical gain" as a loss.  In particular, they won't be impressed by the argument "if I had not deposted my 1000 BTC into MtGOX in 2012, I could be selling them today for 500'000$". 

Actually it is only the koalas who say that.  Real grizzly bears believe that the jump of April 2013 was due to China too (specifically, to Bobby Lee taking over BTC-China), so this is what will happen when China withdraws:

(Actually that is still a rather timid Grizzly because it assumes that the exponential trend before April 2013 has not been affected by MtGOX, Neo&Bee, SilkRoad, etc.)
 

Yes thanks, that seems a better comparison -- I see that "taler" and "dollar" have the samre origin.

I had read somewhere that bitcoin had been essentially banned in India (as in Russia).  Is that true?

I got some useful responses there by posting the question in English WITH the Google Translate version in Chinese.

To improve the chances of being understood, keep the syntax simple (split into simple subject-verb-object sentences with full stops, use plain words, avoid subordination if you can) and translate the result back to English as a check.

Picking a nit: the Chinese currency is called yuan, the Japanese one is yen.  (Although the words have the same origin, it would be like referring to GBP as "the British peso".)

According to the earlier poster, the Madoff clients are disputing with the courts to get dollar inflation over the 20 years considered.  That sounds reasonable. But the profits that they made according to Madoff's books, and did not withdraw, were ignored.

I don't know about forex and gold companies, but they probably work the same.  It may depend on the terms of service, but if whatever asset you deposited was worth 1000$ when you deposited it, iit is effectively the same as if you sold the asset on market just before depositing and deposited the 1000$.

That is the amount by which your wealth was diminished at the time.  Once you deposited, you did not own the asset any more, you owned a paper from the company promising you something.  Once the company failed, its promises became meaningless, only the wealth you lost when investing was still meaningful.  That is my understanding of the logic behind the inputs-minus-outputs criterion.

No, in this case the inputs-minus-outputs will still be the original deposit, since those intermediate withdrawals and deposits will cancel out.  (Deposited 1000 BTC when price was 200$/BTC, withdrew 1000 BTC when price was 500$/BTC, deposited immediately 500'000$ = the inputs-minus-outputs balance is still 200'000$, not 500'000$.) This is in fact an argument for the input-output rule.

You may have some argument if the price at MtGOX was different than the assumed market price.  In the example above, if market price was 500 $/BTC but MtGOX price was 600 $/BTC, you could say that you withdrew 1000 BTC worth 500'000$ but deposited 600'000$.  But the court/adversary would say that you deposited exactly what you withdrew, whether you count that 500'000$ or 600'000$ (because you did not add a cent from your pocket in that operation); if MtGOX's books showed that you had 1000 BTC before the trade and 600'000$ after that, not 200'000$, it is only because MtGOX's accounting was bogus (like Madoff's').

That is the point... 

To be fair, I don't know whether FXBTC's deadline was announced as "May/10 00:00" or "May/10 24:00" or "May/10 midnight" or something else.  However, the "five exchanges agreement" has "May/10 00:00" for other deadlines, so, well, ...

In what conditions were those online poker companies closed -- because their activities were illegal?  Did they have any assets to distribute at all?  Were they based in the US?  Did ANY clients get refunded?

IIRC two posters claimed that US law specifies the "input-output" criterion rather than the "database balance' criterion.  One of them cited Madoff's case as an example.

I can't find any new facts about China; only news, such as these:

International Business Times, 2014-05-13:
Chinese Bitcoin Exchanges Planning to go Offshore to Escape PBOC Crackdown
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/chinese-bitcoin-exchanges-planning-go-offshore-escape-pboc-crackdown-1448335
"Leon Li, founder and CEO of Huobi [said:] 'We don't want to touch the customers' money in China, because maybe [regulation] is going to get worse'"

Want China Times, 2014-05-10
Trading platforms struggle as more banks ban bitcoin in China
http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?id=20140510000119&cid=1102&MainCatID=11
"'If China maintains tough regulatory policies, the price of bitcoin will definitely keep dropping, 'said Du Jun, co-founder of Huobi. [ ... ] Li Qiyuan, CEO of BTC China, said more exchanges may close down in the future."

Yet, looking at the charts, it seems that the Chinese traders are growing more confident, gradually.  It is the "plane didn't crash yet, perhaps there is no ground below" syndrome?

On the other hand, I understand that some customers of FXBTC are furious because the exchange shut down at 24:00 of May/09 instead of 00:00 of May/10, as they had announced:
http://bitcoinnewsbrief.com/blog/2014/05/14/shutdown-of-chinas-fxbtc-exchange-leads-to-customer-outrage/
 

As you must be aware, there is another big difference between liquidation and the Sunlot proposal, which is how the claim of each client is computed.

IIUC, Sunlot will use the account balance that each client had in MtGOX's database, at some point in time; whereas the liquidators (if Japanes law is like US law) will consider the total amount deposited into MtGOX minus the total withdrawn, converted to Yen at the historical BTC prices, ignoring the trades made inside the exchange and the final balances in the database.

Obviously, some clients will have a strong preference for one criterion, some for the other criterion.  Does Sunlot intend to force the "database balance" criterion also on the clients who would prefer the "input-output" one?  Note that clients who have a large database balance might have no claim under the latter criterion, and vice-versa.  IIUC, clients with larger claims do not have more right to define the terms of the liquidation than those with smaller claims.

Moreover, when exactly will the balances be counted? 

Before MtGOX finally closed, there was a long period when withdrawals were blocked or nearly so.  During that period, MtGOX's clients were selling or buying bitcoins inside the exchange not for speculation, but in desperate attempts to get their money out, or to have a better change to recover after its probable collapse --- while there was still no information about the status of its assets.  Thus, using the balances after that frantic trading would be potentially very unfair to some clients, especally if some clients had inside knowledge and were able to acquire large balances through that unfair advantage.  (This, by the way, is another argument for using the "input-output" criterion instead of the "database balance" one to define the claims.)

So he is being given immunity by Sunlot without even issuing a public statement about his role in the collapse?  (He was MtGOX's CFO, is this correct?)



Thanks for the clarification.  However, is the intent to exclude the former management of MtGOX from the asset distribution a mere feeling and vague intention, or is Sunlot commiting to that in writing through a legally binding contract/proposal?

Otherwise, one big difference between the liquidation and the Sunlot proposal is that Mr. Karpelès (and Mr. Gay-Bouchery, and  Mr. McCaleb?) would get nothing from the first, and maybe a good slice of the 220'000 BTC from the second.

By the way, was Sunlot one of the potential MtGOX buyers contacted by Mr. Karpelès before he finally filed for bankruptcy?


Again, is Sunlot commiting to this point in writing, in a legally binding document?  Have any of those firms been contacted to confirm that they would accept this task?  (I am asking because a reputable auditing firm will probably refuse to do an audit of something if it thinks that there isn't sufficient reliable data to support a useful conclusion.)

More nits about the charts:

4. The CSV file does not end with newline.  That may cause problems for some UNIX programs/scripts.

5. The "Estimated Transaction Volume" data too is all integers.  Is that correct?  It ends up being zero early dates, when the total volume was small.

6. The graph "Cost as % of transaction volume" (CPTV)  has some huge numbers before 2011.  Apparently that data is 100*NBM/ETV or 100*(NBM+FEE)/ETV where ETV = "Estimated transaction volume", FEE = "Total Transaction fees", and NBM = new bitcoins mined according to "Total Bitcoins In Circulation". E. g.
12/01/2009 18:15:05
  CPTV = 18541.666666666664 %
  FEE = 0
  ETV = 24.0
  NBM = 12050 - 7600 = 4450
  100*NBM/ETV = 18541.6666666666...
To avoid percentages greater than 100, that screw up the plot, consider including the coins mined/collected in the denominator, that is, redefining CPTV as 100*(NBM+FEE)/(ETV+NBM+FEE)

7. The one-line explanations of the graphs are a bit too terse.  Would you consider providing longer explanations, with precise definition of the values plotted?  (For instance, how is the transaction change amount estimated?)

Check my signature, again... 

About the "charts" section of the site ( https://blockchain.info/charts ):

1. The CSV data for the chart "Average Transactions per Block" is formatted with 1 decimal, but that decimal is always zero.  Possibly an integer division which shoud have been float?

2. Could you provide a chart with "Number of Blocks per Day"?  (It can be computed from "Average Transactions per Block" and "Number of Transactions per Day", but that would give an approximate result, whereas the number of blocks is an exact integer.)

3. The cursor-tracking label on the interactive plots shows only the value (Y axis).  The date (X axis) must be guessed.  Could it be shown in the cursor-tracking label too, e.g. below the value?

Thanks...