Mt. Gox says it found 200,000 bitcoins in ‘forgotten’ wallet
Tokyo: Mt. Gox said on Friday it found 200,000
“forgotten” bitcoins on 7 March, a week after the Tokyo-based digital
currency exchange filed for bankruptcy protection, saying it lost nearly
all the 850,000 bitcoins it held, worth some $500 million at Friday’s
prices.
Mt. Gox made the announcement on its website. Online sleuths had
noticed around 200,000 bitcoins moving through the crypto-currency
exchange after the bankruptcy filing.
The exchange, headed by 28-year-old Frenchman Mark Karpeles,
said the bitcoins were found in an old-format online wallet which it
had thought no longer held any bitcoins, but which it checked again
after its bankruptcy filing.
“On 7 March 2014, MtGox Co. Ltd
confirmed that an old format wallet which was used prior to June 2011
held a balance of approximately 200,000 BTC,” the statement said.
It added that it moved the 200,000 bitcoins from online
to offline wallets on 14-15 March “for security reasons”. “These bitcoin
movements, including the change in the manner in which these coins were
stored, had been reported to the court and the supervisor by counsels,”
it noted.
Many of Mt. Gox’s 127,000 creditors, who feared they had
lost their investments when the exchange filed for bankruptcy, are
sceptical about what the exchange has said happened to the bitcoins it
had. In its bankruptcy filing, Mt. Gox also said $28 million was
“missing” from its Japanese bank accounts.
Bitcoin tracking
On Thursday, a US judge in Chicago overseeing a class
action against Mt. Gox revised a previous order, allowing some of the
exchange’s bitcoin movements to be tracked.
“Today in court we got relief ... specifically to track
the 180,000 bitcoins, which we’ve been monitoring. Hours later, Mt. Gox
claimed it “found” these bitcoins ... it appears Mt. Gox realized we
were close and decided to acknowledge that it owned these
180,000-200,000 bitcoins,” Steven L. Woodrow, a partner at law firm
Edelson, told Reuters via emailed comments.
Edelson is representing Illinois resident Gregory Greene,
who proposed the class action over what he claims is a massive fraud.
Mt. Gox blamed the loss of 750,000 bitcoins belonging to its customers
and 100,000 of its own on hackers who attacked its software.
Bitcoin is bought and sold on a peer-to-peer network
independent of central control. Its value soared last year, and the
total worth of bitcoins is now about $7 billion. Reuters
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