Writing on-dead-tree letters is a flowery way of describing what you did, but it gives no actionable signal.
I cannot agree that you had insufficient notice from me regarding my opinions of Bitcoin or operations in the Bitcoin economy. That tweet went as close to the line as I could without risking arrest, contemporaneously. It was preceded by probably a few hundred comments on HN and Twitter about Bitcoin and businesses in the ecosystem.
I appreciate that you want a list of steps you can take in the future. I have described a way to reproduce the unpaid, unpublished original research project which I did, in sufficient detail for any competent researcher to reproduce it.
You think that that series of steps is not actionable. I respectfully submit that you are not capable of reproducing it; these are two different things. You are illiterate in the language that the research was conducted in. I'm sorry; that is true, and it is the nicest possible way to phrase it unambiguously.
You should, in the future, not make investments which you are incompetent to evaluate the risk factors of. If you must, you should secure the advice of competent professional advisors. If you believed yourself competent to evaluate the risks of doing business with Mt. Gox or believed the quality of the advice you had to be adequate, you should be skeptical of your self-assessments of your competence or your ability to evaluate competence in a professional advisor, and apply this skepticism to your reasoning process about future investments.
Patrick, I respect your writing. But your answers are rarely straightforward. Even now, when you risk nothing, you refuse to reveal precisely what you knew and how you came to know it. I'm skeptical that you knew anything of consequence, and I think this is a way for you to appear prescient. But if you say you discovered something, we have no choice but to believe you on reputation alone. I wish you'd share with us what the Great Sages know, but who can blame you for wanting to stay a member of their ranks? It's only through secrecy and obfuscation that you can maintain the aura.
> you refuse to reveal what precisely
> you knew and how you came to know it
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Then... That's the answer. Obviously. The point is, he's given no answer yet made grandiose claims.
I suppose it's lucky he doesn't feel like telling tall tales. He could cook up something convincing.
People who say that are people who don't understand fiat money's ONLY purpose is to track who owes what. It's debt-based. If Alice pays 1 unit of currency to Bob is because Bob gave her a product or service worth 1 unit of currency. Bitcoin is great at tracking "debt": universal, electronic, decentralized, robust, inflation-proof.
I don't understand how someone can hold the opinion that Bitcoin has no value. At the very least, it enables a lot of crime, which is valuable to criminals.
The problem is that most of us can't wait until time -> infinity.
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. "We're totes solvent; all of our assets are on deposit at Mizuho", "All of our problems are due to banking partners", "The Financial Services Agency said we're compliant with all their regulations", "Japanese banks can't send more than 10 wire transfers per day; it's physically impossible because they're technologically backward", etc etc.
This is sort of similar to "But how do you know that their application is vulnerable, $SECURITY_RESEARCHER?" The answer "I bothered to look" might be unsatisfying, but it is not inaccurate.