I am just upset at the lack of communication and payouts.  He used to be so active here, now he says nothing.  He doesn't indicate a regular period of when we can expect payouts.  He doesn't show calculations of how much the site has made in revenue vs the latest payment.  Heck, he didn't even pay out anything the last few months until today.

I can sympathize with his position. He'll likely never be able to pay back the entire BTC balance, so every hour he spends conducting activities for bitfloor, he's essentially working for free.  And that will likely never change.  That would be discouraging as hell.  But it still doesn't change what happened.  He needs to be in communication of some sort, or at the very least, give regular monthly payments.

I don't see how a court would view Bitcoins any differently than any other debt.  They would peg it to USD value for certain (potentially retroactively to the value at the date/time of the theft), and only make a judgement in USD, but it doesn't matter if someone owes me Bitcoins or they owe me bananas - it is still something of value that they are indebted to me for.

Bitfloor might also be protected by an LLC or something too, in which case, a lawsuit wouldn't matter.

Clarification.  An LLC (or incorporation) doesn't protect the company.  It provides liability protection for the owners.  The reality is that like most Bitcoin based companies Bitfloor doesn't have any "real" (tangible) assets.  You can't get blood from a stone.  Unlike a company which has warehouses, inventory, office equipment, etc which can be liquidiated Bitfloor assets would be limited to the brand (which would be destroyed in a bankruptcy), and the code plus any operating capital.  Bitfloor has paid out excess operating capital on a quarterly basis so I doubt you are getting more there.

The reality is a lawsuit is in nobody best interest.  Between court costs, legal fees (including Bitfloor's legal fees which will deplete operating capital) even if one got a judgement for the full amount it simply means Bitfloor would be forced into bankruptcy and creditors would be lucky to get 5 cents on the dollar.  The liquidated value of Bitfloor (as opposed to operating value) is very low.

For those ganshing at the teeth for a lawsuit here is a practical excercise.

1) Estimate the cash on hand (both BTC & USD) that bitfloor has
2) Estimate what the assets (code base, customer lists) of bitfloor could be sold for in liquidation (note most assets liquidate for 10% to 30% of face value in BK).
3) Add 1 + 2 together and subtract bitfloor estimated legal fees.

3 is the total liquidation value of bitfloor.  Divide this by the current amount owed (in USD) and that is % each creditor could expect to receive in liquidation.  Now subtract legal fees.

What if later on there's a countersuit against whoever brought this suit, to try to recover lost potential repayments, and the person who brought this suit is not protected by any LLC, resulting in the remaining people who did not want the initial suit getting repaid from this initial suer's personal financial holdings? Could that happen?

Since in the U.S. all debts can be repaid with USDs, the BTC debt is at the BTC/USD value from back in September when the incident occurred.  BitFloor is actually making good progress on repaying the $210K USD (wild guess from memory) that was owed.    For anyone hoping to receive the number of bitcoins on "hold", um ... ya.  Since those 24K BTC are now worth over $2 million, about the only hope for that size of repayment would be if BitFloor were to score somehow like through an acquisition or something like that.

That's fine, but legal responsibility is not social responsibility. Also, thats 2 mil now. The exchange rate may drop sometime in the future.

I would agree with you, up until FinCEN defined bitcoin as a currency.  That is a huge game changer across the board, and specifically in this situation.

According to Bitcoincharts.com, Bifloor traded nearly a million dollars in volume today.  That's a daily commission of $2,700, and over a year, that totals $1 million dollars.

Now granted, this was an unusually high volume day, and the exchange can't be expected to match today's activity every day, especially not the weekends.

So to take a more conservative estimate, over the last month, nearly $5.1 million has been traded no Bitfloor.  Over a year, that yields commisions of $184,000.

Couple these estimates with two more observations:

1) The volume on Bitfloor has been rising very fast, much faster than any of the other exchanges over the last few months.

2) There's a lot of angst over Mt. Gox's performance of late.  People are looking for an alternative.

Granted, the debt it owes is growing just as fast, but exponential spikes like this are temporary and the price will settle down soon.  As one of the people who lost bitcoins in the heist, I'm hoping volume stays strong when the price wanes.

What I'm getting at is:

Bitfloor is making some serious money, and is growing very fast.  From a cash flow perspective, it's thriving.

The next time the price settles, the best thing for both people like me who are owed bitcoins and for Shtylman is to convert the BTC debt to dollar debt.  The debt will be paid off quickly the next time the price spikes, and Shtylman will start raking in some serious profits after the debt is cleared.

I don't really want to argue about this since nobody I've seen, Shtylman included, makes your argument.  But just for the hell of it:

1) The value of the missing bitcoins has grown by X*10.  That's a huge difference in what I'm missing.  For me personally, if those coins hadn't been stolen, I'd be contemplating retirement right now.  It's like a fork in my existence that decides what kind of life I will have.

2) Shtylman made the decision to allow cash withdrawals after the heist.  He could've said that everyone who had funds on the exchange, both dollars and BTCs, would take a haircut.  But he made a clear differentiation between cash holders and BTC holders.  He let cash holders withdraw their funds while BTC holders would
have nothing in their accounts.  By that decision, he's owes us BTCs, not cash.

3)  As I said originally, it can work out for all parties involved, Shtylman included, if the next time there's a stabilization in prices, he converts the BTC debt to dollar debt.  Everyone benefits in that scenario provided Bitcoin flourishes in the future (and if it doesn't, everyone, Shtylman included, loses whether or not the debt is paid back).

Thing is, I don't believe that's true.

Just as an example, there were about 24K BTCs stolen.  If the exchange were to stabilize at today's volume (6,500 BTCs), then every day, it would earn in commission 19.5 BTCs.  That would mean 3.37 years to pay off the BTCs if he converted his commissions to BTCs at the end of each day.  Obviously, that doesn't include operating costs, and today's volume may not stay constant, etc.

But I can wait 4 years.  

It might even be less time if the BTC debt is converted to dollar debt and the price keeps rising.

Shtylman started the exchange 1 year ago.  He could pay the debt off in 4 years.  Imagine starting a startup, and not earning much for the first 5 years, but then earning millions after that.  Wouldn't that work for you?  That's the situation he's in.  (A simplified scenario, obviously).

So far I haven't even talked about outside investors, but that's a way to pay off the debt even faster, whether via equity or bonds.  There are multi-million dollar investment houses looking for a way to get on the Bitcoin trade without enough liquidity at the exchanges to get on board.  Buying equity or debt in Bitfloor on a 3-4 year horizon might be an attractive alternative.