> you refuse to reveal what precisely
> you knew and how you came to know it
I see, in his previous comment:
> Mt. Gox said lots of things, including
> some things which were, ahem, very effing
> improbable and yet which alleged very
> specific facts about people outside of the
> building
and then a list of those facts that could be fact-checked.
What could he, as an outsider, possibly have written to a bank that would let him determine whether Gox was solvent?
The simplest answer is "nothing," but we're meant to believe otherwise.
We could go through each item on that list and try to reverse engineer which entity he wrote and what he asked, but this indicates he isn't being straight with us. That's fine; it's his right. But it's a little odd. If someone performed some badass investigative journalism that could've blown the whistle on the Gox case long before anyone knew about it, who wouldn't want to brag about it after the fact? Especially when it'd be so easy to illustrate the steps taken.
We're talking basic questions like "What did you write?" and "What did they say?" But we're meant to guess.
I think a large part of the problem of "verifying" Gox was that people desperately wanted the story to be true.
If a big-name bank operated a bitcoin exchange that was repeatedly hacked, came up with a mountain of excuses about why people can't withdraw, made nonsensical claims about doing business (e.g. 10 wires/day, not trading in the USA etc.), no-one would use them.
(edit: in The Real World, I imagine they'd have been shut down in seconds flat thanks to regulations, but for the sake of convenience let's pretend regulations don't exist)
Instead, we had a plucky new underdog that people wanted to believe was creating history.
You see a business destined to fail, I see a line of incompetent exchanges playing Russian roulette. One of them died and the rest got lucky.
Bitstamp, Bitfinex, Cryptsy, more I've forgotten, were the competitors really more reliable?
I've been in a position to see some absolutely insane stuff happen on exchanges [most of it gets quietly buried), and I really don't think MtGox was anything remarkably different.
I don't think patio11 is claiming he did any in-depth investigation, and is saying that when the company seemed to start having problems they made odd claims like a bank cannot process more than X payments per day sound unlikely enough that they indicate a person lying to cover their ass
you're being pretty unreasonable. he took a look at the body of evidence, including statements from the company itself, did some follow-up (i doubt the specifics actually matter), and got a really bad feeling about it. the technical term for this is 'spidey sense'. also 'bad juju'. or 'his bullshit detector went off'.
what if the answer you're looking for is, "he called up someone at mizuho, went and got a beer, and the guy let it slip that that gox is broke."
then what? hmm? haha what are you going to do about that? that's how the vast majority of insider information (note i didn't say insider trading) is passed. are you going to replicate that the next time around on a specific asset that's about to crash, or a specific company that's going to go insolvent? good luck, friend. this is how the world works; you clearly were not in on it, none of us were, that's why a bunch of people were left holding their dicks in one hand and an empty wallet in the other (i don't deal in bitcoin because i'm too dumb to comprehend it, but i saw the carnage online).
at the end of the day he believed something differently than most. it's not any more complicated than that. that's how people generally make a bunch of money, or in this case, prevent from losing a bunch of money.
also, he lived or lives in japan and speaks japanese, so that's probably going to be the major hurdle for you to grasp his process - he has a lot more day to day context of how all this stuff works in that country. unless of course, you live there too, in which case, that's even worse for you. sorry pal.
