Indeed; I disagree that it's "unlikely that whoever is in charge of Mt. Gox's assets would be that shortsighted". Their priority will be immediate liquidation

Indeed; I disagree that it's "unlikely that whoever is in charge of Mt. Gox's assets would be that shortsighted". Their priority will be immediate liquidation of assets. They will simply not be concerned about maximising the return and certainly not concerned with preserving the bitcoin economy. It will be about getting USD (or JPY) as soon as possible. I would think. Not an expert but this seems reasonable. It's the same reason you can buy cheap office equipment when a company goes into administration. They could get more if they spent more time selling it, but their objective is to liquidise, pay off debts and move on. On the other hand, is it clear that suddenly releasing 200k bitcoins would be catastrophic? I remember similar mass selloffs in the past which did cause dips but only short term (the decline in BTC value over the last 6 months is surely not the result of a few isolated large-scale selloffs!?). Not sure about the volumes involved in the past though. They were derided as irresponsible IIRC. But bitcoin survives, more or less.