Most of the time when a company has "unfulfilled orders" as they enter bankruptcy what happens is that what ever is left is divvied up. A company rarely has Zero Assets. In the case of MT. Gox they likely have about $4M in assets that will be sold to cover those who are owed something. Depending on who you ask that could be a few billion to a few hundred million. So let's make the napkin math easy and say they owe $500 Million and they have $5M in assets, every bitcoin you had would be paid at a penny on the dollar.
Will anyone go to jail?
Most likely not. Mt. Gox claims they were wronged, not that they stole your money. If that is true, or a bug caused them to lose your money it would be the same as if a bank was robbed prior to FDIC insurance (if they were robbed) or if the bank just invested poorly. They didn't do anything criminal. They were just stupid. Prior to FDIC putting your money in a bank meant if the bank failed your money was gone. (FDIC insures you up to $100k in a bank, but does nothing for Cryptocurrency). If Mt. Gox was a Ponzi scheme that would change this answer, but I don't hear people saying that.
What should you do if you want to get your money back?
Make sure that you are named at the bankruptcy hearing. Yes, that may mean going to Japan. If you lost $100k or more it may be worth going. There will be tiers of payback, and those who were most injured will get the most back. Someone who lost $29 is likely going to get nothing, ever. But if you lost $1m you may be able to get 10% of that back. If you lost more than $100k you may want to sue Karpeles out side of bankruptcy. While the Bankruptcy protects him from being sued for losses, it doesn't fully protect against negligence. He has personal assets. You need to talk to a lawyer about this, as the rules are complex, and your losses would have to be near catastrophic, because this would be a punitive reward, not something based on debt.
Can you sue the VC's?
Only if you think you can prove that they knew Mt. Gox was doing something illegal, that the public didn't know. Bankrolling Silk Road wouldn't count for example.
Why don't they answer the most-asked questions ("will I get my money/bitcoins back?" / "how much of my money/bitcoins will I get back, and when?") up-front on the homepage?
They probably don't know the answer or can't legally tell you. I wouldn't be surprised if most answers the call center gives are "Sorry, we don't know/can't tell you".
If japan is anything like other countries, there will likely be a date set for a creditors meeting, and the call center will simply be instructing people to attend the creditors meeting to have their questions answered.
Anyone who has money (either fiat or btc) in mtgox is essentially now an unsecured creditor and mtgox seems to be in bankruptcy protection / proceedings. You wouldnt get answers out of any other company in bankruptcy or insolvency, everyone will just have to patient until the Investigators/Administrators have finished their audits and have a restructure plan in place.
Most logical answer is because they don't know. By delaying statement, they're probably hoping to buy enough time so that they can actually answer those questions.
Also interesting is that Mark Karpeles signed it "Representative Director" rather than "CEO". Maybe that's a legal thing (since they're under bankruptcy protection), or maybe he stepped down?
The typical way that chapter 11 bankruptcy works, in America at least, is to imagine a big wedding cake. The bottom layer in the shareholders, the next layer up is the bondholders. When the company goes bankrupt, you slice the bottom layer off the cake: the shareholders get 0, and all the bondholders become the new shareholders.
That's for chapter 11, when the business is trying to stay as an ongoing concern. Lots of businesses that are bankrupt on paper still have quite a bit going for them -- if they could escape their legacy debts, they have more money coming in than going out, and it's socially good to keep the company going. Many people keep their jobs and the creditors have the best chance of becoming as whole as possible.
Mt Gox is not going to reorganize. Like Arthur Andersen after they failed to properly audit Enron's books, whether it's their fault or not they have failed at their one primary mission and no one is going to trust them ever again in a business that makes trust paramount. They are gone, dust, over. It's hard to even imagine what pieces of their corpse would be useful to other businesses, besides gox.com which is a three-letter domain name.
IANAL, and I'm especially not a bankruptcy lawyer.
Sadly, gox.com may be a nice three-letter domain name, but you'll have to depreciate it on the same schedule you'd use for a barrel of cesium 137. Nobody is going to want a piece of that action for a long time.
The point is that after going through all the bankruptcy process, they most likely will have all their code audited and checked, as well as external entities for monitoring.
MtGox will be one of the best secured exchanges after it, that's for sure - I don't count on MtGox going down at all.
You assume they will come out. More likely everything will be sold. The value of the sale will be put in a pot, and that will be dished out to those owed money. Those most harmed will be paid first.
It is very unlikely Mt. Gox will ever reopen. It is unlikely anyone with less than $1000 in losses will ever see more than $20.
Except that exchanges need trust. Customers need to be able to trust that their money will be safe, that they can move their funds in and out freely, and that the exchange wont just take their money and run. This is especially true with an unregulated currency, like Bitcoin.
Do you really think that anyone will trust them going forward? If they can manage to get their business back in order, do you think that customers will go back to them as opposed to one of the other exchanges that now exist?
Plus, I was under the impression that one of the major reasons why US-based people still had accounts on MtGox was that it was so difficult to get USD out. It's not like they were winning customers before. A great deal of them were just locked in and couldn't leave.
Plus, I was under the impression that one of the major reasons why US-based people still had accounts on MtGox was that it was so difficult to get USD out. It's not like they were winning customers before. A great deal of them were just locked in and couldn't leave.
I'm a little unclear on that, myself. I don't understand the idea of holding someone's bitcoins hostage. As a depositor at MtGox, couldn't you just send the bitcoins out to another exchange or to your own wallet? What would possess someone not to do that at the very first hint of a liquidity problem?
I'm probably missing something rather fundamental but I don't see how these clowns ever had any genuine control over anyone's coins. Transferring them should always have been an option.
The "virtual PBX" market is pretty crowded. Grasshopper is a good introductory service. There are some Skype/Gvoice-based options like Zaplee and PrettyMay. Moving up a bit you'd find RingCentral and Phonebooth which are a bit more capable.
Also, there are turnkey call centers, fully staffed. You get a number that gets routed to certain agents, and they answer as your org, have your flowchart/website/whatever. You're typically charged a setup fee, monthly fee, and per minute, but you don't have to go hire your own people.
Will you get your Bitcoins back?
Most of the time when a company has "unfulfilled orders" as they enter bankruptcy what happens is that what ever is left is divvied up. A company rarely has Zero Assets. In the case of MT. Gox they likely have about $4M in assets that will be sold to cover those who are owed something. Depending on who you ask that could be a few billion to a few hundred million. So let's make the napkin math easy and say they owe $500 Million and they have $5M in assets, every bitcoin you had would be paid at a penny on the dollar.
Will anyone go to jail?
Most likely not. Mt. Gox claims they were wronged, not that they stole your money. If that is true, or a bug caused them to lose your money it would be the same as if a bank was robbed prior to FDIC insurance (if they were robbed) or if the bank just invested poorly. They didn't do anything criminal. They were just stupid. Prior to FDIC putting your money in a bank meant if the bank failed your money was gone. (FDIC insures you up to $100k in a bank, but does nothing for Cryptocurrency). If Mt. Gox was a Ponzi scheme that would change this answer, but I don't hear people saying that.
What should you do if you want to get your money back?
Make sure that you are named at the bankruptcy hearing. Yes, that may mean going to Japan. If you lost $100k or more it may be worth going. There will be tiers of payback, and those who were most injured will get the most back. Someone who lost $29 is likely going to get nothing, ever. But if you lost $1m you may be able to get 10% of that back. If you lost more than $100k you may want to sue Karpeles out side of bankruptcy. While the Bankruptcy protects him from being sued for losses, it doesn't fully protect against negligence. He has personal assets. You need to talk to a lawyer about this, as the rules are complex, and your losses would have to be near catastrophic, because this would be a punitive reward, not something based on debt.
Can you sue the VC's?
Only if you think you can prove that they knew Mt. Gox was doing something illegal, that the public didn't know. Bankrolling Silk Road wouldn't count for example.