It is very telling why everyone regularly gets their money stolen by market admins. Instead of just joining the hivemind I decided I should actually try to look at the information being presented and decide for myself.
No one ever asked for proof that they didn't lose a large portion of their holdings even after they admitted to losing money, they just believed the admins who are carders.
In the face of alpha02 obviously cherry picking evidence that there was a hack. Alpha02 deliberately ignored all the evidence of the "Under new management" message, deleted posts out of the sub-reddit and denied a bug existed that caused him to lose and undisclosed amount of money until he was absolutely forced to. We know at least 12,000 USD was lost but this was only the person willing to talk about it, so we can assume more than 12,000 USD since that must have not been the only person using their new feature.
I asked for the TXID of the 10 BTC that was paid to see if anything interesting could be found, because I don't just believe people when they tell me things. (They asked me for a Bitmessage to receive it so I'm going to guess they ("Cosa Nostra", fucking stupid name) are gonna be pissed that I posted this TXID here since someone could do analysis on where the money goes but fuck them) e63e935159c94e3d40322617033769754b0aaee18b92303d139751659e27e51d
Doing taint analysis I was able to find several active addresses still holding coins used to pay for things regularly, these addreses are presumably alpha02's personal addresses. I was also able to find an address that had 8,000 BTC pass through it but I don't want to do LE's work for them so if you want to find those you will have to do that yourself.
The interesting part is this: Analysis shows that this money was taken from a lot of deposit addresses and consolidated. This is where alpha02 has been paying debts from, taking money from the site regularly and in chunks of 100-175 BTC
https://blockchain.info/address/1NfJddRxuMqyGKNhXeFWVY6RcB6ujcUwMG https://blockchain.info/address/17Sc177DN8hviNC9YTRdqCSMMoDAdEWPS https://blockchain.info/address/1LbbCPhyWE7rYMNDFB17Po4RCVH6pGRqem
You can find several posts by alpha02 where he claims the majority is in "cold storage", but what is actually happening here is he is consolidating the money and putting it in his personal wallet as a form of cold storage and using it to pay debts.
So yes he did pay for the bug out of pocket, because your money is already in his pocket.
Redditor since 6 hours and FUD again, but interesting question. Alphabay has tens of thousands of addresses, constantly shuffling. It will take years to map where all the coins are going. The posted transaction ID is real, but it means nothing. Let's make things simple: everytime a user deposits money to Alphabay, a new address is generated. The deposit is made, and the coins remain in this address. On a regular basis, the coins are shuffled among all the thousands of deposit addresses. When a user withdraws, the system picks a random address (or many) and makes the withdrawal originate from a few of those addresses. It isn't impossible to trace, but makes it very hard since we don't have a "master wallet". When we say "hot wallet", we mean "hot wallets". We have a few cold storage addresses as well. 8,000 BTC passthrough means nothing. I can create 2 addresses, and send coins back and forth to make 1 million BTC passthrough. Paying a debt out of pocket means that I deduct the amount from the comission payments I take, writing it as a site expense.