I wrote: Some important details: > > - There's no hard evidence at any point that anyone has lost their > bitcoins. ... > > The details that are coming to light are somewhat different than I had understood them. I now read in the New York Times that Mt. Gox is suspected to have had 744,000 bitcoins quietly stolen from them over a period of years [1]. This seems to be in addition to their technical challenges relating to "transaction malleability," i.e., their misinterpretation of how to implement the bitcoin protocol, which has possibly led to their paying out money to people who did not hold bitcoins with them (or something like that). Multiply 750K by 400-1000 USD to get a sense of the loss this potentially represents. That amounts to about six percent of all bitcoins outstanding. It's interesting to keep in mind that early on, 744,000 in bitcoin would not have been nearly as much as it has become. Mt. Gox is apparently filing for bankruptcy.
Assuming Mt. Gox were not the ones behind the theft, I imagine that at some point when they realized they were improperly doing their accounting and were being attacked, they went back and tried to see how their accounts balanced, doing things the way they should have been doing them all along. It was probably a stomach churning moment for the developers when they took a look at the number that popped up in their terminals. Eric [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/business/apparent-theft-at-mt-gox-shakes-bitcoin-world.html?_r=0
