I am Mt. Gox's first employee – AMA
Notable tidbits (most of which were already public record if you followed the story very closely) include:<p>+ Mt. Gox commingled depositor and corporate funds.  (Corroborated in the Japanese version of their docs released by the bankruptcy trustee.)  Many in the community believed that they had promised not to do this (true) and they this was impressively unprincipled (I lean against this understanding).<p>+ Mt. Gox had standards of engineering professionalism which were not what one would hope would prevail at a financial institution with $500 million in assets.  True and previously reported.  Specific examples include lack of a staging environment, source control, testing procedure, engineering leadership, auditing... it goes on.  Also might suggest in future not putting all code into MySQL.<p>+ At one point all BTC deposited at Gox were accessible by VNCing into a particular box, which suggests that claims that Gox had cold storage secured by keys kept in diverse physical locations were not consistent with conventional interpretations of engineering reality.  (The new information here is "VNC."  It was previously known that at one instant in time Gox proved its reserves by moving all it's BTC in a single transaction.  This could be done in a way consistent with what the community thinks "cold storage" should mean; the VNC bit militates against that understanding.)<p>+ Employees of Mt. Gox believed, on the basic of public evidence, that the firm was losing money even at the peak.  (I'd be interested in seeing their math for this; that was not the conclusion I reached in a napkin calculation in mid-2013.)<p>+ Wages at Tibbanne (which provided 100% of employees for Gox) were consistent with prevailing wages in Tokyo startups i.e. scandalously low.  50% of employees earned less than $2k per month; director-level salaries in order of $4k, except for...<p>+ ... explicitly alleged looting of customer funds to support director lifestyles.<p>+ Management was unable or unwilling to answer basic queries regarding finances internally.<p>+ Gox's bus number was one, and that bus would have resulted in $500 million being unrecoverablu lost.  Management, when asked about this, lied brazenly.  (Last part is new info, first part obvious.)<p>There's more at the link.