Rick Falkvinge: The Gox Crater

Thousands of volunteering and self-organizing detectives have been meticulously laying a puzzle that reveals the Gox billion-dollar heist as an inside job. As smoke clears on the implosion of the Empty Gox bitcoin exchange, thousands of people in the community committed to revealing the truth behind the stonewalling exchange. What was claimed first to be a technical problem, then an outside theft, has been conclusively determined that the MtGox management knew too much, too long ago, to have this be an ordinary case of theft.

There are still many question marks remaining surrounding the missing 744,408 bitcoin at Empty Gox, valued at their peak to just under one billion US dollars, and which are well north of that in replacement value on the open market today. What’s becoming clear, though, is that this wasn’t a theft that properly shut down operations as soon as it was discovered. Instead, Empty Gox and its CEO Mark Karpeles appear to have attempted to benefit and profit from it. That would cross the line into criminal complicity, even if they were not part of the original loss – something that also remains an open question… CONTINUE