[btcfn]

I have little sympathy for Mark. Assuming he didn't straight up stole the money, it all happened because of his incompetence.

How do you not notice a leak of 850,000 BTC?

How do you not have most of it in cold storage?

How do you not have all kinds of alert systems warning you about even a 500 BTC discrepancy, let alone hundreds of thousands?

[danielweber]

You have to get bookkeeping exactly right.

You have to get crypto exactly right.

Bitcoin sits on top of both of those sharp pyramids.

Yesterday someone on HackerNews compared a Bitcoin account to a pressurized system where the slightest failure means you lose everything irretrievably and instantly which is a great analogy.

You don't need Good Enough for this. You need Perfect for this.

[jeremyjh]

No you don't need perfection to add some basic controls that would have prevented most of the damage here.

[wmf]

Hence the theory that the missing BTC is in cold storage but the private keys have been lost.