From: James Bowery
If Karpeles didn't notice something was going wrong when 50% of his Bitcoin assets were gone -- which should by extrapolation been at least a year ago -- then he wasn't the one running the show. I suspect foul play by some outside agency that saw Karpeles as a central point of control in the exchange market place and also as a soft target. Can you spell "Yakuza"? I can't, but my spell-checker helps :-) This scenario is now looking like it has organized crime written all over it. The best hope for recovering anything is to sell the film rights. Along with built-in deflation, this is looking like a big drawback since the bulls-eye is now on the exchanges - and that could be another systemic weakness of the basic scheme. Something similar to this heist, if that is what it is, could happen to any private exchange which has little access to Police protection ... (meaning they will have to cooperate with the FBI and IRS to get help, which is what their customers dread). Probably most of them will be targets of the mafia, of whatever country they are located in - since the word-on-the-street of a successful multimillion dollar heist spreads faster in the underworld than the STDs. It would not surprise me if Terry and Blaze are out there selling Bitcoins short. as we speak.
