The takeaway, if you had any bitcoin in Mt. Gox when it fell:

You won't receive any repayment until Feb 2015 at the earliest.

Important note: you must fill out a form claiming your debt in order to be considered for repayment in Feb 2015, i.e. as an Mt. Gox debtee, you are required to manually inform them (via their form) of how much money you're owed, otherwise you'll receive nothing. The form can't be filled out yet, because they haven't released it, but presumably they'll post it on mtgox.com sometime in the upcoming months, so make a mental note to keep your eyes open for it and fill it out whenever it's posted. If you haven't sent in the form by Nov 2014 then it sounds like you're guaranteed to get nothing.

It also seems fairly likely that you won't recover much of your money. That's just speculation on my part (and I would love to be wrong about it) but it seems like it's time to make peace with the idea that you probably won't be seeing >75% of your money ever again.

That said, Mt. Gox recently found 200,000 BTC that they had somehow lost track of: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/21/us-bitcoin-mtgox-w...

... so those 200,000 BTC may be distributed among creditors. Since Mt. Gox's total bitcoin debt has been quoted at around 750,000 BTC, that would mean in an ideal world you'll eventually receive 26.6% of however many bitcoins you had at the time of Mt. Gox's shutdown.

But the world isn't ideal. It's unclear how such a repayment scheme would work in practice. For example, how will Mt. Gox repay debtees who are owed USD/EUR/AUD/etc, not bitcoin? E.g. let's say someone's Mt. Gox account balance was 3.25 BTC and $3,132. How would Mt. Gox's 200,000 BTC be fairly distributed in that situation? Would that $3,132 debt be converted into BTC debt? Or will Mt. Gox sell some of that 200k BTC in order to get US dollars, which are then repaid to that $3,132 debtee? And if all US/EUR/AUD/etc debts will be converted into BTC debts for purposes of repayment, what prices will they use for the actual conversion? (That is, how many BTC per how many dollars of debt?) Will they use current bitcoin market value for the conversion (which is currently $494/BTC) so that $3,132 would be equivalent to 6.34 BTC? Or will they use the value of bitcoin when Mt. Gox shut down operations?

What if they decide the best way to proceed is by selling off all 200k BTC for US/EUR/AUD/etc, which is then distributed among debtees? It's their decision; it seems like that scenario isn't impossible. You can imagine how a firesale of 200k bitcoins would completely annihilate BTC's market value. Of course, it's unlikely that whoever is in charge of Mt. Gox's assets would be that shortsighted, but given that bitcoin is completely new to most legal systems, who knows?

The point here is that your money's fate is up to someone else. Your money stopped being your money the moment you deposited it into Mt. Gox, or Coinbase, or any other third party. And now that Mt. Gox has collapsed and taken your money with it, it's probably best to accept that all of your money is 100% gone and never coming back, because that way when Feb 2015 rolls around you might be pleasantly surprised if Mt. Gox happens to repay you some small percentage of your holdings. (A pleasant surprise is much nicer than a sore disappointment, which is why I recommend pretending all your money is gone. Worst case: all your money is gone. Best case: some of it comes back to you via carrier pigeon. Actually, that would be the Awesome case.)

So let this be a lesson about the dangers of trusting a third party with your money, unless that third party is insured by a government in the event of disaster.