Was this a relatively young BitCoin exchange? One would hope that the wallet.dat was backed up somewhere else (another EC2 instance, EBS, offline).
This doesn't bode well for establishing credibility in BitCoin exchanges and operators. Although nobody necessarily needs to use the exchanges, for better or worse, people use them to establish market values to more easily value their transactions.
It's obviously easy to criticize after the fact, but I am genuinely curious how backing up critical data wasn't considered. Unless, this was a very young / recently launched BitCoin exchange as a weekend hobby project that took off?
They've been around for a few months and were one of the higher volume exchanges. They were doing ~800 BTC in trades/day for the month prior to this, so ~$11k/day with their commission of .006*2 (I think it was .006, and on both sides) they were pulling in ~$130/day.
You're operating in an unregulated market. Your legal protections for when someone outright steals your money are much weaker. You might be able to sue them... if you could get to Poland. Not only is your market unregulated, you don't share a jurisdiction with the "bank" unless you live in Poland.
So it's not the only way of profiting legally as much as it's the only way of profiting ethically.
I don't think this particular case was malicious, but I think people are vastly underestimating their risk exposure to a malicious exchange. Thankfully, the bad guys seem as incompetent as the people running bitomat.
If it's a scam, lying about losing the file is useless, since all the BTC transactions are publicly logged. You can just input their address(es) on the Bitcoin Block Explorer and see if any of them are being used.
Of course, that doesn't mean you'll have any legal recourse against them.
The addresses being used don't necessarily indicate the exchange owner was lying. An enterprising AWS engineer might have been able to recover the wallet somehow. At a value of $200,000+ USD it'd be worth looking for.
Here's that plan laid out: Sell BTC for EUR; deposit EUR in a checking
account/savings account; receive a bank's interest on the EUR. As
customers demand the BTC in the amounts enumerated in BTC that you
still owe them (in great numbers after some announcement like the
above, or otherwise), buy BTC with EUR and sell it to the customers.
Pray continuously that you don't lose your shirt with these
conversions, particularly given that unexpected spikes in BTC demand
will come precisely at those times that you'll tend to lose out on a
conversion.
You might, extremely conservatively, sell BTC to people in exchange
for a promise of a greater amount of future BTC (i.e., you might lend
BTC out). Step 1 in that scheme: find anyone who will borrow BTC who
isn't either a lunatic (and therefore unlikely to be able to repay the
loan) or a thief. After subtracting lunatics and thieves, you're left
with people who will take some BTC, sell it for EUR, attempt to make
money, and then at a future date buy BTC for with any EUR they've
made. I.e., with people who will need to pray almost as hard and as
long and with as much chicken blood and magic circles as an exchange
that took your suggestion to get interest from a bank. Your
borrowers won't have to fear a sudden demand for the money, but
they'll still have to fear the BTC:EUR exchange rate.
Meanwhile, approximately 100% of BTC holders are speculating in the currency.
This doesn't bode well for establishing credibility in BitCoin exchanges and operators. Although nobody necessarily needs to use the exchanges, for better or worse, people use them to establish market values to more easily value their transactions.
It's obviously easy to criticize after the fact, but I am genuinely curious how backing up critical data wasn't considered. Unless, this was a very young / recently launched BitCoin exchange as a weekend hobby project that took off?