Feel free to review the source code on GitHub. You run the app yourself, within your Google account. There are no external connections.

I don't have high hopes for anyone being able to take over the business at this point. It seems law enforcement is involved and I doubt anyone would want to dive in to the hodgepodge of code and risk losing all the funds once more. Thanks for the link though. Reading over the thread now.

It really pulls at the heartstrings. So many people are affected by this. I have to wonder how many more stories are out there. We need to get the community together to make sure our bitcoin brothers and sisters aren't sleeping on the streets. It seems highly unlikely at this point that customers will be made whole. We need to plan for the worst.

Thanks, Howard! I look forward to seeing you on the exchange!

Thanks, R. You're not alone. Will you be ok? Where do you live? How can we help?

Manu, that is horrible. It must be very difficult but thank you for sharing. I really hope that Mark turns out to have simply made an honest mistake and lost the private keys to the cold wallet. Gox had over 1 million accounts, and over 500k verified users. I can't imagine how many people must be hurt by this and in a situation similar to yours. In a way this is worse than the Bernie Madoff scandal because this is likely to have a much more damaging effect on a much greater number of people. It certainly isn't the time to go for blood when we've got people like you who those resources would better be spent on. Nothing will come of pursuing Mark and Gox if they really are bankrupt. How are you doing now? Do you have a place to stay? Would you be interested in helping form a sort of Gox users support group where people who've lost everything can go for help from the community?

I've been complaining about this for a while but there are plenty of people new to Bitcoin who have no clue about Gox's past. They just see Gox come up over and over when they search for Bitcoin, and as the market leader on charting sites, etc. There are not warnings plastered all over the internet telling people not to trust Gox. People continued to prop Gox up as the premier exchange, and they drove a lot of naive traffic who signed up and deposited funds.

There are a few problems with realtime audits--like needing to have access to your keys on demand of some 3rd party, which is probably not the most secure way to manage your cold storage. I think regular, quarterly or monthly audits should suffice. The auditor may do some additional transaction/wallet monitoring in between to make sure funds aren't being lent out or leaked out.

Robert, I'm so sorry :( I hope you're doing ok. Do you want to share your story? It might help for some others in the same situation to know they're not alone.

Guns blazing, full speed ahead! :)

oh baby, don't go!

When we were out there helping, the word we got from Mark was that they were not more than 4000 BTC short from the hack, which was easily covered by Mark/Gox's reserves. Things were undoubtedly much less sophisticated back then so it is conceivable that had fewer controls and lost much, much more.

The ends certainly do not justify the means, but I may be in the minority with that opinion. The glitch was with Gox (so they say), not really with the bitcoin protocol. Nobody else had such serious problems and Kraken had no problems.

I'm sorry to hear that :( I was thinking the same thing.. the liquidator was entrusted with those coins and they ought to be held responsible for the loss. My guess is that they don't have much we could go after but I'll be speaking to our attorney about it who has been helping us with the case in California. I'll let you know what he says. I doubt Mark has anything either at this point.

There were something like 2.6m coins mined in 2011. Back then Gox only had around 60,000 users and many were early adopters with fat accounts because there was nowhere else to trade and bitcoin was cheap. Interesting theory about the coercion.. definitely a possibility but I think more plausible than that or my own theory is that they simply lost the keys to their cold wallet.

Bitcoin has many advantages over gold and silver. I highly recommend you have a read of Erik Voorhees post on The Role of Bitcoin as Money: http://evoorhees.blogspot.com/2013/05/bitcoin-2013-role-of-bitcoin-as-money.html

Actually, there were about 6,500,000 coins in existence at that time, and the handoff to Mark had happened. I agree though, it is very likely that Mark has just lost the private keys to the cold wallet. Hopefully, we'll know for sure what's going on within a few days.

Personally, i don't trust anyone with the private keys to my bitcoin. Blockchain is great. Don't keep any more bitcoin on any exchange (including Kraken) than you are actively trading with. Why take unnecessary counterparty risk? There are so many things that can go wrong, even with best intentions.

Maybe I was attempting to protect consumers from losing their funds at Gox. I only redirected them very recently.

hahah possibly! I will shoot you an email!

Sorry to hear we won't have you as a customer. Personally, I'm a fan of free enterprise but unless you've got an army, regulations are a necessity if you want to stay out of prison. The other benefit, as a customer, of your exchange being compliant is it's one less reason for your exchange to be suddenly be shut down, along with access to your funds.

I registered them in June of 2011, from the Mt. Gox office in order to protect Gox from additional security threats. When I had lunch with Mark last month, he asked for the domains and I told him I'd transfer them to him as soon as he provided me his registration information. Before he got around to it, everything blew up.