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Comment by zubairq | Hacker News Reader

Having lost over 350 Bitcoins myself, I would say this is a fair verdict. Mark Karpeles was in over his head, that is true, but so are most people in startups or companies that end up hurting people or losing their money. If we were to start jailing people who lost other people's money then 95% of all people who take investment would be in jail.

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So, if you buy bank shares today and it turns out the bank has been insolvent for 2 years already and management was hiding this from investors, this is totally fine, as long it's not an established bank but a "startup" bank, am I understanding you correctly?

Mark was in way over his head but nobody says he should be jailed for being in way over his head. He should be jailed for defrauding people. He cooked the books and he hid the fact that MtGox was insolvent practically from the moment he bought it.

You may be right, I don't know. I will probably have to wait until some good unbiased sources explain how the whole thing unfolded from start to current day. I've been wrong before, and maybe I am this time too, but right now I give Mark the benefit of the doubt until I am sure

And yes, I did lose money from insolvent banks too in the 2007 - 2008 Financial Crisis, and no one went to jail for that either, even though they hid information from investors and depositors... but that is partly why I was interested in Bitcoin in the first place...

Kim Nilsson's work is as good and unbiased as it comes and it pretty much explains everything you need to know about the missing coins:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l70iRcSxqzo

https://blog.wizsec.jp/2015/04/the-missing-mtgox-bitcoins.ht...

Btw, with your 350 coins, I hope you've already submitted a claim and are planning to vote on the upcoming Civil Rehabilitation plan.

Thanks, I'll check out those videos, and the claim stuff.

Comparing Magic The Gathering Online Exchange to an FDIC regulated bank.. He was running the equivalent of a fraudulent trading card ring that happened to become very valuable.

Mark has some of my coins and I think he's done enough time. Prison in general is cruel and unusual for anything besides violent offenders.

When Mark started running it it was a Bitcoin exchange. Everyone banters about the origins of the name, but all they really did was reuse a domain name.

Big Banks and Wall St. are glad you think like that.

I wasn't talking about big banks or wall street. I was talking about startups who take investors money, and often totally mismanage their companies. They usually don't do it to cheat investors, they are just over optimistic, and not experienced enough.

What I guess you are referring to is when big banks and wall street deliberately cheat and take investors money. And I think that should require people going to jail.

Optimistic and/or naive people are not exempt from being held accountable. Regarding this particular case, Karpeles was handling lots of money and clearly 'cooked the books' for his own advantage. We know that.

Also, from my own personal experience, startup culture is full of lies and deceit, and investors are not always big money firms looking to land its next unicorn exit. Regular people also invest in many startups.

There can't be special rules is all I'm saying. We need to improve 'startup culture' and one of the ways of doing that is by holding people accountable.

I agree with most of this, especially about the deceit and lies, even with a lot of the fast growing startups like Facebook and Google. There are also a huge number of honest startups, but we don't hear much in the news about them as they just keep going along making a couple of million dollars a year for their founders.

It is hard to hold people accountable as the legal system doesn't support this, even here in Europe. I don't know how to improve startup culture myself, except maybe to act with integrity in my own work, and to make sure that I do my homework better when I evaluate a startup

And yes, regular people generally get wiped out when they invest in startups, it happened to me a few times in the past too, but I wanted Unicorn exits too the same as the VC firms :)

There is a world of difference between being an investor of a startup and having your money/property with a company. The former is an owner and the latter is a customer. Also, I find it odd that the top two comments are the same "over his head" and "fair punishment".

I agree with this, "There is a world of difference between being an investor of a startup and having your money/property with a company."

I also believe the punishment is what Mark has gone through since 2014 when MtGox officially went down. From what I have heard Mark has suffered enough, and I hope he can turn his life around

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