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Comment by stephenboyd | Hacker News Reader

That's amazing. He screwed up and lost so much of the customers' money the company so much they had to go into bankruptcy, which pegged the company's debts at the bitcoin-to-yen rate of 2014. The company has over 200,000 bitcoins.

So the rise in value of bitcoin has made Mt Gox extremely valuable in bankruptcy (possibly more valuable than if it were properly managed from the beginning) and now Mark Karpeles is a billionaire. Is that a correct understanding?

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If you can believe what he wrote here, he’s not happy with how this turned out and he’s working to make the customers as whole as he can. If so I have to respect the guy at least a bit, since it sounds like he could pretty easily walk away from this as astoundingly wealthy man, all legally acquired.

> So the rise in value of bitcoin has made Mt Gox extremely valuable in bankruptcy (possibly more valuable than if it were properly managed from the beginning) and now Mark Karpeles is a billionaire.

Yes it has made MtGox valuable but not made Mark Karpeles a billionaire.

I can't speak for Japanese law but bankruptcies normally have an overseer, in this case a trustee. They control the assets of the bankrupt companies and decide on how the creditors are paid. Creditors include customers, Mark Karpeles, his investors and debtors, if any. So, customers can still approach the MtGox trustee about the payment.

To reiterate I am not a lawyer, but in most cases they might be able to file a suit against the MtGox estate too.

He's stated he that he intends to avoid the outcome that ends with him becoming a billionaire. https://www.coindesk.com/mt-gox-ceo-dont-want-bankrupt-bitco...

That's just for the bankruptcy case. There are other cases/class actions on the way.

Bankruptcy in the US (which is of course different than Japanese bankruptcy) may discharge those contingent liabilities as well, IIRC from law school.

Yes.

The fact that this needs to be said on the first comment is, to my mind, remarkable and why I've never been a fan of Bitcoin:

"Good luck going forward. Considering that you could probably single handedly crash bitcoin with what you have in your wallet... Uh... Please don't?"

Bitcoin's caused some hilarious lessons in what "decentralized" actually means. Bitcoin isn't controlled by some nasty evil central bank; it gets to be controlled by a mostly random collection of maybe intelligent and definitely lucky people with no oversight whatsoever.

He already did:

https://www.coindesk.com/mt-gox-trustee-sells-400-million-bi...

The market was recovering from the crash when this happened, and it went down the toilet again right after that.

Funnily it recovered (to die soon after again), but we have seen the Mt Gox weight in action already.

turns out that if you build something that requires zero trust, you end up not being able to trust anybody. who knew

That sums it up as far as I can tell. The narrative of, "I don't want/deserve this huge windfall I'm receiving is beyond absurd." The solution seems pretty simple. Compensate those who suffered losses because of the mistakes your business made. Duh.

He says that he would like to do so, but can't, because he doesn't have access to the coins: "I don't have control over the Bitcoins in the MtGox estate, however myself as well as many creditors are pushing for the trustee not to sell until a decision is reached for civil rehabilitation." and "The trustee was appointed by the bankruptcy court and I have no control over this process at this point. I only wish to see bitcoins returned to all MtGox creditors as soon as possible."

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