*fistbump*

So the crash started 05:15?
Does that tally with the Windows time in this vid? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1X6qQt9ONg

Probably. It took very long time before it reached $0.01.

I feel pretty neutral about this whole thing, but am I right that you're saying if this whole thing was the result of a bug or employee error and the huge trade that crashed the market was never even entered by a market participant that that somehow makes it MORE necessary for Mark to pay out the 260k or 500k or whatever?

Like, if you ever have a computer glitch there's no do overs and the exchange or broker should be instantly liable for the entirety of the bugged trades? Doesn't that sound just a weee bit unrealistic to you?

It was down to 5.0 at x:47
Did it really take 30 mins to go from 17 down to 5?

I would also recommend that option but question if the FBI is the appropriate authority, if the business you are running is done on US soil and the suspicious activity comes from US soil too, then yes FBI would be the most appropriate agency to contact although you should that via the local police. It is their job to elevate it to national, thus federal, level.

If either party is foreign, well things get a whole lot more complicated, to the level that it might be best just to report to the police and most likely never be heard of again.

It might be an idea to have this whole fiasco recorded, signed by a notary and publicized on a prominent accessible part on your site.

Although a whole lot of people carry the sentiment that this could have been prevented, this hindsight is of course 20/20. Security as a goal can not be achieved, though it is a path that should be followed. A common rule of thumb is that the effectiveness of countermeasures can be roughly divided in 75% organizational, 15% structural and 10 % electronically. Meaning that switching to an alternative OS with a more robust database and scripting language might seem the right thing to do, it is more effective to make rules that prevent or at least monitor suspicious activity.

I wish you all the best and strength to carry on, this mishap is naturally a lesson learned, but not as much as some on this forum make it sound. From where I stand this should not affect you on a personal level at all. It goes more in the oh-f* category, you already demonstrated you have a plan for contingency and are open to what is going to happen. The only thing that remains is doing that and rest is water under the bridge.

Believe me this is less of a screw up than when I accidentally shut down a banks main transaction mainframe (it was the end of the day and I typed shutdown -P now in my laptop terminal, which was actually an ssh session over to a box that was serial console attached to that SUN machine).

Luckily for me that bank had a hot fail over instance in another country, though waiting another 10 unpaid hours to verify the machine came up cleanly is synced and took over master role is not something I would like to do again :-).

However since the exchange itself was compromised and the price was not a accurate representation the transaction was not entered into in good faith by both parties.  Now that doesn't bode well for Mt Gox since you never want your currency exchange to be compromised like that, but its something Kevin and those in his situation will have to come to grips with since their purchases made during the flash crash were indeed illegitimate.

Apparently they're all tied up investigating strange tentacle monsters stealing schoolgirl panties...

..which, are actually worth more as a currency than bitcoins...

...in tentacle monster land.

I fat fingered a trade at one point and bought 20 coins at 111 instead of 111 at 20 (numbers somewhere along those lines, I forget the exact numbers).  Should I get those back?

With that said, I'm not saying that he should get the coins because I don't know the answer to that.  That's one for the law to figure out once they have all the evidence.  There's just way too much fishiness going on.  I plain don't believe for a second that some unnamed person with 500k bitcoins had an easily hackable account that some hacker happened upon.  A lot just doesn't add up.

And that Mt Gox is now trying to connect Kevin to the hacker just puts it over the top.