If the poster above has an informative post, I'll upvote it regardless of who he is.
It's about the content, not the people.
I’m sorry you both lost money and had it locked off for years; many people in the world, including me have had the same experience. I’m not the cause of your loss, and I’m not in control of its return.
Some longer thoughts on the case below; if it expands your perspective all good.
What we have asked for in the six years since we sounded the warning on mt gox insolvency with our suit (a full year of public warning for everyone who used gox) is a fair trial. The trustee repeatedly slowed or stopped that process, including going to the extraordinary measure of helping get Tibanne into bankruptcy six weeks before our US trial so that the case would be stayed. Before then Mark avoided the suit so aggressively that we had to go through The Hague convention to even serve him papers.
That was many many years ago. We have never slowed a single court date or asked for a single extension. We just believe we are owed a fair adjudication of our contract and have proceeded both in confidence on the merits of our case and with the fundamental confidence that a party harmed by breach of a contract has the right to have damages determined.
The narrative that we are the hold up is absolutely not true. In fact, we have never even been offered a settlement from the trustee which we could accept or reject. The trustee cheerfully went to court in venues he thought he could win, even negotiating for a return of some of mutum sigillums seized funds in the US; he could have had a ruling years ago from a US proceeding if he had wanted it. He clearly did not want that.
We just want a ruling from an independent court on our 2012 contract, a contract made during an era of $10 bitcoin with a man who ended up committing US federal money laundering crimes, ‘lost’ 500k+ of the public’s bitcoin and has since been imprisoned.
Public tweets or essays speculating we want something else come from two places - either from those who have decided, a priori, that our contract must not have been valid and therefore doesn’t even deserve due process and ergo is just a form of petulant spoiling, or are funded by VERY large claim holders in a sort of PR based pressure process.
All that said, I would be very happy to continue to talk with you about this in person or on a live chat; my email is [email protected]: feel free to reach out to me to continue this dialogue.
As to who has a right to be where online, I will say over the years I have left some of my own thoughts about my career here and benefited immensely from others doing the same. I’d like for there to be places like this that aren’t gate-kept even if people are fighting.
If you look back in my post history you will see one of my first posts/comments is about deciding not to go into business with Jed Mccaleb when he was running gox out of his bedroom in Costa Rica, long before either of us had heard of Mark Karpeles; I think that’s a cool bit of history!
I liked and appreciated the HN community 10 years ago, and hope to be appreciating it in another 10.
Yeah, only problem is your "we only want what's fair" narrative is sliiighly undermined by the fact that you started with a $75M claim, then went to $16B!!!! and now that the $16B claim got thoroughly rejected you changed it to $500M. You ran wild with the $16B claim because the assessment phase didn't require any court fees and you picked the biggest number you could think of, to block the process. Now for the appeal you actually need to pay court fees as a % of your claim and being well aware that the $16B figure is ridiculous, you changed it to a number that's still big enough ($500M) to block the process but you don't have to pay that much court fees.
Not to mention that your contract with Mark only stipulates $50M of liquidated damages and the rest of your claim is based on potential lost revenue if MtGox never went bankrupt. This is not a thing in Japan or anywhere in the world. You know that very well and your lawyers know it very well. The most you could hope for is the $50M and the rest of your claim is just there to block the process and extort the creditors. So, please, drop the "we only want what's fair" charade. You can only fool people not familiar with the case, which is probably what you're after.
That's not why I'm attacking Peter even while that's against my favorite forum's rules and I might get banned for it. I don't think Peter is comparable to Satan. Peter also hasn't murdered someone, he's not committed an act that stemmed out of emotion, or a great need, or that he regrets.
Peter is a human being that has made the decision to put his greed ahead of tens of thousands of people. At any moment could he say, "ok I'm sorry this was a bad idea" and stop and still gain millions of dollars. He doesn't. He is consciously hurting people for a possibility to make this absurd amount of money.
In my frame of ethics, I can't just let him go around unharassed. If he goes unharassed it means that I, or we as a community, are ok with people behaving in an unethical manner. I'm sorry you had to witness my comment, I know it hurts the thread, but I just can't not make it.