Although it has been more than a year since the MtGox exchange was declared bankrupt, we are still dealing with a growing number of questions and doubts about its operation, as well as the real reasons for its insolvency. In addition to the official investigation into the matter, a number of private investigations are also underway - including this one by network security specialists, Japanese company WizSec. This one decided yesterday to publish more facts related to the exchange that it has managed to establish. WizSec's independent investigation is one of the longest-running private investigations into the matter, and one that boasts the best results. In February this year, WizSec's Japanese experts published their first report on the case. It was largely devoted to the activities of a notorious bot operating on the MtGox exchange, referred to as "Willy", buying up significant amounts of bitcoin at regular intervals, thereby significantly inflating its price. This time, the fundamental question that WizSec experts posed to themselves was: did most of the 800,000 bitcoin that mysteriously "evaporated" from the MtGox exchange really exist? Were these bitcoins ever in MtGox deposit accounts or were they just false entries in the exchange's registry and we are now dealing with an inflated value of the actual losses suffered by the exchange's users at the time? By looking at the data stolen by hackers from MtGox servers and made public in March 2014 - assuming the deposit and withdrawal logs contained therein are authentic - we are able to deduce changes in the total value of bitcoin in MtGox deposits over time. The data we have does not go all the way back to the beginning of the exchange, so without a reliable reference point, we would only be able to note individual changes in deposits, without determining their total amount. This kind of "reference point" appears however after the hacking of MtGox which took place in 2011, after which Mark Karpeles made an, let's call it "audit", public transfer of 424.242.42424242 BTC - therefore we assume that at that time there must have been at least that amount of bitcoin in the deposits of the exchange. Calibrating the above chart with this value, WizSec determined that there should have been around 950,000 BTC in the exchange's accounts at the time of its collapse (February 2014) - this also coincides with one of the values contained in the data that came out of MtGox's servers in March 2014. However, if we want to determine with much more certainty the actual state of the exchange's deposits at the time of its bankruptcy in February 2014, we need to have all the bitcoin addresses (public keys) used by MtGox. The experts at WizSec could not, of course, count on help from the Japanese receiver overseeing the exchange's bankruptcy case at this point. To do so, they were therefore forced (to put it somewhat simplistically) to laboriously compare the logs from the March leak with publicly available records of bitcoin's public transaction ledger - the blockchain - and mark the relevant transactions over time as those related to the exchange. After completing this painstaking and complicated process, however, WizSec boasts of having what it calls a "surprisingly reliable" list of 2 million MtGox addresses. The list was also to be confirmed with unspecified "sources" who were also to be consulted by the company's experts. In this way WizSec was able to establish the "real", in its opinion, picture of changes that occurred in the exchange's deposit accounts between 2011 and 2014. Juxtaposing the two charts - the estimated one and the "real" one - we come to a sobering conclusion. Already since mid-2011 both sets of data are divided by a growing gap, which quickly grows to the order of several hundred thousand BTC. By mid-2013 there are practically no bitcoins left in MtGox deposit accounts. At least since 2012, the exchange was operating (consciously or not) on the already negligible reserves. We also get an interesting picture when we put the difference between estimated and "real" data on the graph - the process of "disappearance" of bitcoin continued uninterrupted since 2011, only its pace gradually slowed down. Starting from about mid-2013, the curve is almost completely horizontal, which may indicate that at that time there were practically no funds left in MtGox deposit accounts. It is also worth noting that by cross-referencing the data from the deposit and withdrawal logs with the data from the blockchain register, WizSec specialists were also able to rule out the hypothesis of fraudulent deposits being made into the exchange's accounts (at least on a larger scale) - the bitcoins that ended up in MtGox were, in the vast majority, as real as can be - which also means that any accounting discrepancies discussed here
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