No, gox works like all the other bitcoin exchanges, people send them bitcoins and/or fiat currency which they put in the person's gox account. The exchange provide an mechanism to let them swap one for the other with somebody else, and a mechanism for withdrawing whatever is in your account back to your bank account or bitcoin address or whatever.
The key here was that somebody basically compromised gox's security rather than some random user's security, and managed to put coins in a gox account without actually depositing any bitcoins. This was why rolling back was a justified action (albeit the hack shouldn't have been possible to being with).
The key here was that somebody basically compromised gox's security rather than some random user's security, and managed to put coins in a gox account without actually depositing any bitcoins. This was why rolling back was a justified action (albeit the hack shouldn't have been possible to being with).