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I would not like to be in the shoes of mtgox CEO... He lost about 400M USD, some of them probably belonging to shady peoples (drug dealer, mobs, etc.)
by malka 13y ago
I would not like to be in the shoes of mtgox CEO... He lost about 400M USD, some of them probably belonging to shady peoples (drug dealer, mobs, etc.)
- kyleblarson 13y agoGiven their physical office location I wonder if any Yakuza have(had) any BTC in MtGOX. That could get interesting.
- davidw 13y agoThose kinds of guys don't seem like the type to trade cash, which they know well, for magical internet money that they know nothing about.
- gwern 13y agoThe Yakuza have been moving into white-collar and financial crime for decades, and Japan has had cellphone-related quasi-currencies for a long time now. It's not that big a stretch.
- saraid216 13y agoUh. If I was in organized crime and I heard that Bitcoin was a great way to do money laundering, I'd make sure I knew about it. That's half the point of organizing crime to begin with.
- icelancer 13y agoHow do you know a highly organized unit of crime is technologically illiterate?
- davidw 13y agoWell, the local bunch are certainly not all that sharp from that point of view. "In April 2006, fugitive Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano was captured in Sicily partly because some of his messages, written in a variation of the Caesar cipher, were broken. Provenzano's cipher used numbers, so that "A" would be written as "4", "B" as "5", and so on.[11]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_cipher http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_cipher And this wasn't just some bozo, but a Mafia boss who was certainly into a lot of different "lines of business": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardo_Provenzano http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernardo_Provenzano
- Uberphallus 13y agoThat's the first thing I've thought. Back in the old SR days you could hire hitmen for pretty reasonable amounts, especially compared to 750kBTC.
- Phlarp 13y agoBack in the old SR days you could hire FBI agents posing as hitmen for pretty reasonable amounts, especially compared to 750kBTC
- ekianjo 13y agoWell that's what people say, yet I haven't seen lots of executives in large companies where scandals have occurred suddenly getting randomly killed by hitmen in the streets. And Madoff's still alive, too.
- mpclark 13y agoBut isn't that just one of the differences between a regulated business and an unregulated one? Madoff isn't dead, but he is in prison.
- ekianjo 13y agoWait, nobody said that MtGox's CEO won't go in prison. There will be a lawsuit following the losses. The Law still applies when you start taking money for a service.
- AmVess 13y agoWell, a gentleman flew all the way from the UK to Japan to have a polite chat with him, so it's not outside of reality for someone to do bad things to him fairly easily. Beyond that, CEO's of large companies are generally under guard when the crap hits the fan, and Madoff was protected by police. I wouldn't be surprised if the "CEO" of Mt. Gox soon finds out what a tire iron tastes like.
- obsession 13y agoEven if you were a shady drug dealer, revenge doesn't get your money back.
- wpietri 13y agoThe reason I trust normal contracts to work is that I pay for guys with guns to enforce them. I call them "police", and my payments "tax". But if you are doing deals that are illegal, you have to provide your own enforcement. The rational interest of a criminal here wouldn't be revenge. It would be reputation maintenance. The reason mafia loan sharks are known for breaking kneecaps isn't that they're personally upset, or that they can't afford the loss. It's that they can't afford anybody else thinking that their loans are something they can walk away from.
- SilasX 13y agoThat's the theory, anyway. Let me know how it actually goes when you get defrauded and see if that super-reliable infrastructure has your back, or if your case is too small for them to care about. "The government provides protections" != I can completely trust my contracts to work because of it".
- wpietri 13y agoI didn't say it was super-reliable. Or that I trust my contracts to work. But it certainly has been enough for my needs. Despite a lot of years in business, I've never felt a need for extra-judicial enforcement.
- VLM 13y agoThought experiment. So your biggest crooked customer has a balance of 10% of your net liabilities. And someone steals 1/3 your net worth so you're basically outta business and the biggest crook on the planet just took a 1/3 haircut, which he's not going to be too happy about. You tell the biggest baddest gangster of a customer, you can more than triple his current balance at the mere cost of guaranteeing your personal safety in perpetuity and having a crony of his and a crony of yours re-enact the 1/3 theft. After all, you just figured out what happened, and its not going to be too hard to arrange for it again two more times. So that leaves the biggest crook in the world in debt to you, a fat bank account, and lifetime guarantee of protection from said crook. Do some deals with the crooks competitors to make sure they know he gave you his word, so if he ever goes back on it they'll never trust him again. Or run the same scheme three times and make sure the top three crooks know that the enemies of the guy who kills you off are going to split your fortune if you croak. Or lets say you make "all" the BTC disappear but you actually have enough control to reimburse every player big enough and criminal enough to actually hurt you, with millions left over for yourself. Your biggest customer is about to get powned as a money launderer by the DEA/IRS and his only legal hope is to make your records look untrustworthy. Would any court of law trust MtGox's records after today? I guess there's no proof anymore that some bad guy was about to get powned. Well, there's an easy way and a hard way to do that, at least WRT collateral damage to the execs family members. And if you still tangentially somehow have control of the "lost" money, nobody important need actually hold a grudge. I'm not saying any of this is true or even possible, although it could be the plot of GTA:7 or similar. These are better hollywood movie plots than the formulaic dreck we're forced to endure.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago>These are better hollywood movie plots than the formulaic dreck we're forced to endure. I'd watch this movie(s).