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Is there any way to identify if I'm a creditor with the email I registered with years ago?
It is far far too late to get paid. Several deadlines have passed.
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Wrong. Look at Self-Approved Claims here: https://claims.mtgox.com/faq
Doesn't that page say the deadline for those claims was in 2019 (not even to be submitted, but to contest it if you're refused)?
I received some letters in Japanese 10 years ago saying I was part of it, but I haven't really heard anything since
its amazing that the American system is resolving FTX almost within 2 years, in comparison to the Japanese system

says a lot about the two economies and their entire ethos

Meaningless comparison, crypto has grown a lot since 2013
The Japanese system hasn’t and Mt Gox’s bankruptcy trustee issues have almost nothing to do with the presence of crypto and more to do with the presence of grifters taking advantage of the idea that something to do with crypto makes it administratively complicated

when it really makes it simpler

It should be noted that the American system also does not give FTX creditors this kind of windfall - under US bankruptcy law, their claims were effectively converted to dollars at the time of the bankruptcy, and they see no benefit from increased crypto prices since then. I'd assume this simplifies administration a lot, contributing to a faster resolution, but many FTX creditors are unhappy about it: https://www.wired.com/story/ftx-creditors-crypto-payout-reje...
It's weird that people who had dollars on FTX can get 118% back but crypto "has to" take a massive haircut.
Generally, you're not entitled to potential losses as a bankruptcy creditor.

Those creditors were welcome to sue the entity in bankruptcy for their potential losses, but that would involve demonstrating they'd have had the wherewithal to hold to the point of the gains they're claiming.

I do think that FTX creditors should not have profited out of the bankruptcy proceedings, either.

This is what initially happened with MTGox as well. The subsequent increase in value complicating things is a large part of why the MTGox resolution has taken so long. The original plan to reimburse the yen value of claims at the time of collapse was no longer a fair solution. The payout due now was proposed and voted on by the claimants. The process has been slow but very methodical, at each stage there were long periods where they gave claimants time to respond.

I, for one, would not like to be in charge of pressing the button that distributes several billions of dollars to thousands of different people without it fucking up. If someone is doing that this July you would hope that they have dotted all their Is and crossed all their Ts.

I'm ready for the button presser to say "Oops! I got hacked, sorry it's all gone again."
Part of the problem was the lawsuit from CoinLab, which took years to resolve. There wasn't anything like that with FTX.
Granted, individuals will only receive ~15% of their original claim, the increase in value over time will make it worth it for many.
People lose their shirts in crypto because they lose it, trade it, and sell too soon.

The only proven way to make a killing in crypto is to be physically prevented from losing it, trading it, or selling it for ten years.

The fear of losing is greater than the desire to win! So people trade or sell before a ten years timeframe.
This only reads that way looking back over a raising value. Look at a stock that goes to 0 and call the people that sold early fearful of losing,
When the stock/crypto goes up 100% people will gladly take their profits and go on with their lives, instead of waiting for even bigger profits.

When the stocks starts its fall towards 0 people will do incredible mental gymnastics, clinging to any shred of hope that things will turn around and they will revert their losses, so it takes them much more time to get out of the bad investment.

And when crypto goes to 0?
What is the most likely scenario in which you see Bitcoin changing hands for ~0 value, or I suppose not changing hands?
People want to get real money out of it.
I transfer it to people on the slowest method for 1st borns baby shower. I used it on furniture at Overstock.com while they allowed it. I gamble with it. I have donated with it.

For me and probably many others, when expediency isn't an issue, BTC works great.

Bitcoin will never go to $0 because if it ever got to $1 I'd buy all 21 million of them. And there are lots of people like me.
Not if the algorithm is cracked and the supply of bitcoin increases. It’s possible for bitcoin to go to zero. Shouldn’t happen, but it can.
The supply wouldn’t even be increasable if SHA256 is cracked
This is true in crypto, but not true in Bitcoin
They only lose their shirts because its speculative gambling... They are scared the same way the person betting on red is.
You're describing anybody investing in anything (except those who cheat).
I like to distinguish investing from speculating. Investing is putting money into a business which actually makes money. Speculating is buying something because you think the price will go up.
If the price does go up, did it "actually make money"?
investing is not just that. its putting money where you expect the business to make MORE money in the future. if they dont, you dont make money in the end.
It’s also not just that! theres no requirement for a business to be involved for it to be an investment (e.g Gov bonds)
sure. But when talking about stocks which is usually one of the main investment devices, its business related.
> The only proven way to make a killing in crypto is to be physically prevented from losing it, trading it, or selling it for ten years.

Which is very well known in the crypto world with these two mantras:

    - "Not your keys, not your coins" (meaning one shouldn't trust anyone)

    - "HODL"   (aka "hold on to your coins")
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Sounds like a big crash is coming as people dump that stuff.
This isn’t the first time it happened. When MtGox went insolvent, the price of bitcoin tanked and they had enough cash on hand to replace everyone’s funds, but the lawyers said no because there wasn’t enough fees.

This whole thing should have been resolved years ago, I still get bankruptcy emails and I feel bad for the poor soul who has to waste his whole career fighting over who gets the remaining sliver of money instead of doing something productive.

> I feel bad for the poor soul who has to waste his whole career fighting over who gets the remaining sliver of money instead of doing something productive.

Returning money is the most productive thing a lawyer can do.

>>When MtGox went insolvent, the price of bitcoin tanked and they had enough cash on hand to replace everyone’s funds, but the lawyers said no because there wasn’t enough fees.

Which lawyers are you referring to that said "no because there weren’t enough fees"? Seems contradictory because lawyers at the time in 2014 had no idea that the value of the remaining digital assets would rise.

I’m going to guess it might’ve been lawyers that are presently happy to have been able to bill hours for this for the past decade
There are two main sets of legal teams in bankruptcy cases: the estate, usually represented by the court appointed trustee's legal team, and individual or groups of creditors who can afford legal representation.

The Trustee in this case wanted to sell everything and be done with the case, handling it as a standard fiat bankruptcy. I believe that it was only due to creditors with enough sway (i.e. whales who could afford their own legal teams) that pressured the Trustee to value the assets accordingly.

To your point, the consequence of the successful persuasion has resulted in a high number of billable professional services hours from all sides which has definitely been a drain on the estate and creditor wallets. However, anybody (else) implying that it was the [nebulous] "lawyers" who orchestrated an evil scheme to perpetuate their billable hours from the get-go is being disingenuous and/or lazily finger pointing, unless of course they have some evidence or sources to back their assertion up.

> being disingenuous and/or lazily finger pointing

This makes sense because confidently saying “it just sort of happened” is less nebulous or lazy. It is intellectually dangerous to attempt to connect decisions made by groups of people to either the people involved or their decision making processes.

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Notoriously, the site developer wrote his own crypto code... in PHP... which you should never do, regardless, but especially in PHP (I recall some numerical limitation having to do with bit rotation and automatically-signed numbers at the time)
I hate PHP, but this is not a good comment.
Do you have any professional experience using PHP? I have never in my life used another web development platform that requires me to install 3rd party patches like Suhosin to get to a baseline level of security
I didn't know about Suhosin but this is completely unsurprising to me.

It's too bad my original comment got slammed because PHP deserves the slamming IMHO

I completely agree PHP is a terrible language - as I said, I hate it - but your comment was still not very relevant.
Right, but he didn't get hacked because of that, he got hacked because he's the sort of person who would make such a choice. He is just a bad developer and a bad person to have run a bank or anything significant really.
9 billion dollares worth of BTC.

It's honestly not that impactful as people may think.

Note that BTC's last 24h volume was $15Billion (some of it is fake, but it's still alot)

The price reaction to this news proves it.

I wonder if Bitforex, which was either taken offline as an exit scam or government intervention, is going to follow a similar path
About the only way to hold bitcoin without selling is forced to
Ilya's little $5Bn stash is also going to cause issues now his case is over and I assume it is all forfeited by the US govt:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Bitfinex_hack

Wouldn't that be returned to the place it was stolen from?
Well, the issue is that the bank covered everyone's losses at the time, from what I understand, but now all the account holders are asking for a share of this new booty that has been recovered.
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Mt. Gox is short for "Magic The Gathering Online Exchange", and the site's focus was on virtual trading of cards for Magic Online rather than cryptocurrency.
No.

That was the original intent for the domain, but to my knowledge it was never launched.

Yes.

According to the creator, it did. It just wasn't that popular and he switched to a different game, The Far Wilds, for a bit, then pivoted to bitcoin (with entirely different code).

The interview was in 2014 and edited with proof on wikipedia, so I'm surprised people still believe it wasn't a trading card site.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220811085644/https://www.gwern...

They took 20 bitcoins out of me, but I never bothered to fill the paperwork. Oh, well.
Payouts still have not actually started. It is long been theorized that BTC prices will crash when they do, since the market will be flooded with people trying to finally realize their USD gains.
A few thibgs to say for MtGox and its founder: they were a frontline casualty in crypto exchanges, demonstrating irrefutably how important security is. Not everyone got the memo, but many did.

Also, they have been pretty good at accepting blame and trying to fix what they could.