Being directly involved in this I'm not going to comment as of the veracity of the article myself, but rather point to a response of when this was posted on twitter (look at the extra responses for some fact checking):
I have no idea if you have plans to make amends for this. Even now, the top of r/MtGoxInsolvency is a post about opening an exchange again to earn money back for the creditors. Do you have any thoughts on how to make things right? https://www.reddit.com/r/mtgoxinsolvency/comments/ldnrxv/reo.... Yes of course I'm a part of the legal proceedings, but those seem to never end, and seem unlikely to bring any significant recompense.
I can't imagine living a life where so many people direct such incredible ill will towards myself, as you live. Especially given that early Bitcoin folks were often disreputable, and the amount of money you cost them, I assume you must have concerns for your own physical safety.
I hope that you'll consider those of us who are still hurt by your negligence by choosing your words and presence carefully.
So speaking from personal experience...while your anger is completely justified, you have to let it go, or it will destroy you. It’s just one of those things - a random, traumatic event that instantly and irrevocably changes the trajectory of your life, that you can do nothing about. These are jarring reminders that the world is a cold and unfair place, that the universe is not in fact looking out for us, and that people are not “mostly good” as many of us were raised to believe. But holding grudges, even against people that have inflicted unimaginable trauma on you, only hurts you.
And, while I don't think he should necessarily retreat from forums... I just hope that he is conscious of how his presence and words may affect people.
Cheers to you for this. I know I would not be able to do the same.
If you're going to screw someone, you should at least come up with some cover story that shifts the blame away from you, and even then you better hope the truth isn't discovered.
Unfortunately, karma just is not a thing. Among more than a dozen homes he owns are two mansions in California, each over 10k sq ft (at least one of which was paid for with my money), within about 10 minutes of each other. One is on a bluff overlooking the ocean, and the other is more inland where he rides horses with his wife, who is roughly half his age and who was married to someone else until it became obvious to her then-husband that she was pregnant with my business partner’s child. Ironically, among his other business ventures today is a Christian magazine/movie production company.
I will never see justice served upon him. He will continue to live a fabulous life and I, quite likely, won’t. But being angry over it does nothing for me.
You are even starting out ahead as you can impress investors with your past project!
> I hope that you'll consider those of us who are still hurt by your negligence by choosing your words and presence carefully.
This is a clumsy threat and isn't really appropriate.
I truly do think it must be scary for him. I don't know of your involvement in Bitcoin at the time, but there was a much higher percentage of 'not good people' involved then. In the months after the Gox news originally broke, many people were discussing Mark's safety. I still wonder about his safety every time there is a major milestone in the Gox case - and will again when the case finally settles.
In my final paragraph I communicated that Mark's presence here, and the way he communicates will affect members of this community - especially important since this seems to be his first post here.
I do not think me being involved in a new exchange would help make money for creditors. I have provided counseling to other exchanges who asked me to on how to avoid repeating what happened with MtGox and tried to push as much as possible for MtGox creditors to get as much as possible. When I was due to receive over a billion dollar as share holder in the bankruptcy I also made sure everyone knew about it because switching back to a civil rehabilitation needed the support for most creditors and wasn't something I could do (since I'm not a creditor myself).
But of course if I can help in something more I'd be happy to. You will likely receive more than you initially deposited into MtGox through the bankruptcy, but I do not know what you call "significant recompense."
Also most creditors I have been interacting with have been thankful for the help and I do not think that many people still direct much ill toward me, at least it doesn't feel that way anymore, but that may have to do with the lack of death threats and insults on Twitter and such. I'm hoping everyone will be eventually able to move on, but first the bankruptcy must end, and CoinLab is preventing exactly that from happening.
I have been choosing my words carefully, even going as far as avoiding voicing my own opinion here and instead linking to some fact checking from another MtGox creditor. I will however still say that CoinLab and more specifically Peter is clearly abusing his position and using stalling techniques to force MtGox and creditors to accept a settlement rather than having the whole process taking many more years, effectively taking everyone hostage for his own gain.
Staying silent will not do anything for creditors, and CoinLab clearly do not have creditors' benefit in mind. I do think this is important to point out.
We cannot change the past, and we must build for the future. I think when the dust settles, you will be remembered as a pioneer and economy builder.
You authoritatively confirmed that the account is who it says it is as your first involvement in this thread. Was that based on firsthand knowledge? I’m really suspicious about your involvement here and I’m starting to suspect someone figured out just how easily HN can be leveraged if the commentary remains civil and lionizes the right people late on a Friday night when everyone is looking the other way.
People who rescue children from fires are heroes. People who make amends for significant errors, after aggressively trying to obfuscate them for many years, have some measure of retroactive integrity. There’s a difference and while he certainly deserves credit, he’s quite obviously manipulating this discussion in real time (I’m not saying it, but I’m saying it, wink wink).
Call me cynical, call me uncivil, whatever, but what you just said is a giant pile of the absolute worst excrement to ever cross this site. I’m not even involved in this drama, I’ve never speculated on Bitcoin, I have no ill feelings for this person, he cost me nothing, but holy Moses is what you’re doing here one of the most transparent efforts I’ve ever seen.
The more this back room stuff goes on in crypto, where we are all subjected to very public he said she said spats and expected to choose who’s our hero in this adventure and navigate who’s more full of shit, the less claim cryptocurrency has to legitimacy. I’m amazed that’s not obvious to you.
There is no conspiracy here :-)
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/why-i-hired-mt-go...
Rasengan has an obvious bias here, you can call that whatever you want but whatever you call it, he's not a neutral third party. I'm not either, Mark Karpeles stole a great deal of money from me and many others on this site. Rasengan has in the past given this same spiel on HN trying to make Mark out to be some kind of victim of circumstance.
>People who make amends for significant errors, after aggressively trying to obfuscate them for many years, have some measure of retroactive integrity.
At no point has Mark Karpeles done anything at all that could objectively be described as making amends for anything. Jed McCaleb previously indicated that Mark Karpeles was aware from when he originally made the deal for buying most of MtGox that the exchange was already insolvent. He lied to users for years and claimed that MtGox had a cold storage system comprised of 3 geographically disparate locations, of which access to 2 were required to move funds out of cold storage and 95% of customer funds were kept out of the hot wallets. In reality that never existed, and Mark just continually kept emptying the cold wallets that were just stored in their office into the hot wallet. The hot wallet was compromised in a hack, Mark knew the hot wallet was wiped out in the hack, he didn't rotate keys, he just kept dumping our money into a known compromised address and never once bothered to check just how much money was missing until it was gone. The only saving grace was that Mark was so incompetent and blaise with managing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of other peoples money that he quite literally forgot about 200,000 BTC. If he had remembered it, there's no reason to believe that he wouldn't have just kept dumping it in and push the collapse back by another 6 months.
Since the collapse everything's been in the hands of the trustee for MtGox and Tibanne. If Mark Karpeles told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check.
"I can’t give you your money, it isn’t here, it’s in Frank’s house and Joe’s house".
I agree with you on the idea of a new exchange. While it is a hopeful idea, ultimately I don't think that it would be very fruitful. In my opinion, it is about as far fetched as the idea of working with the US Government to get the feds seized from BTC-e to repay the creditors (because apparently the BTC-e folks were the ones who executed the Gox attack?). I assume you agree getting coins from the US Gov't is far fetched.
Thank you for highlighting CoinLab's (Peter's) actions. I am so very ready for the bankruptcy to be over, I can only imagine how ready you are to move on from it.
I appreciate the thoughtfulness you've given to your words. Please don't stay silent.
I was one of those claimants who sold approximately the account value north of 1000 Bitcoins to bring myself in what I thought was a better position when all of your withdrawal methods were blocked. I attempted to withdraw BTC into BitcoinBuilder, but you guys had my account flagged for additional review from a previous TX I had made weeks ago. I had literally zero other options and you guys locked up all of my balance.
Some recompense could be given to now fiat claimants who sold all of their BTC holdings into USD _the day_ that Mt.Gox shut down. There were quite a handful of individuals who did with the same rationale this in the hours leading up to the website shutdown. I'm pretty sure they are the minority of claimant cases looking at /r/MtgoxInsolvency posts.
Today, the difference in market value those few hours for me would have been approximately been $7.9 MM vs. ~500k USD + penalties. There were zero guidance the days that you had your withdrawals blocked off, and any communication of what was going on especially in those few hours would have made such a difference in the 7 years that we/I had our money locked up.
Please look into these accounts that had this sort of activity _in the hours_ leading up to Mt. Gox's shutdown. If any group would be significantly impacted by any recompense, it would be us.
While this obviously doesn't justify what happened with Mt Gox, there was plenty of time afterward to reinvest at significantly lower prices than today, so I don't think it's fair to attribute all those losses to him.
I often have flashbacks to that one tweet I saw many many years ago saying „Bitcoin reaches USD parity“. I was considering investing a thousand bucks at that time, just for fun.
I would be 37 million dollars rich today!
Who am I kidding.
What would have actually happened is I would have sold everything once my money doubled to 2 USD/BTC, and then panicked seeing it rise and rise, bought in again right before a crash and sold everything with a huge loss.
So realistically, you should take what the Bitcoins you lost were worth at that time, and multiply it 2-3 times if you‘re lucky, and that‘s it.
Most of the stories of people getting rich with bitcoin are:
- people invested in the ecosystem, eg creators of exchanges etc
- true believers (rare)
- celebrities like the Winklevosses who actively invested large amounts of money with some kind of plan
- people who forgot a harddrive from 2010 with 100 bitcoins and found it again in 2018. (or like MtGox, where they were stuck in liquidation for so long that the assets are worth billions now)
If you‘re not in one of those groups, I think you realistically do not need to worry about having lost anything more than a few single digit multiples of your Bitcoins worth in dollars back then.
They starting the legal process soon so I might be millionaire soon
I watched that tower fall from a safe distance. I'm not saying it's your fault that you got dragged into the Bitcoin double spend attack, but it's simply part of the game. Easy come, easy go. Don't get caught up imagining fake money you never had. It will weight heavily on your psyche forever.
I was one of those claimants who sold approximately the account value north of 1000 Bitcoins to bring myself in what I thought was a better position when all of your withdrawal methods were blocked. I attempted to withdraw BTC into BitcoinBuilder, but you guys had my account flagged for additional review from a previous TX I had made weeks ago. I had literally zero other options and you guys locked up all of my balance.
Some recompense could be given to now fiat claimants who sold all of their BTC holdings into USD _the day_ that Mt.Gox shut down. There were quite a handful of individuals who did with the same rationale this in the hours leading up to the website shutdown. I'm pretty sure they are the minority of claimant cases looking at /r/MtgoxInsolvency posts.
Today, the difference in market value those few hours for me would have been approximately been $7.9 MM vs. ~500k USD + penalties. There were zero guidance the days that you had your withdrawals blocked off, and any communication of what was going on especially in those few hours would have made such a difference in the 7 years that we/I had our money locked up.
Please look into these accounts that had this sort of activity _in the hours_ leading up to Mt. Gox's shutdown. If any group would be significantly impacted by any recompense, it would be us
Why not? Just be transparent.
And for what it's worth, I agree that this is a bad article based on what I know about the situation. Bloomberg reporting in general is questionable these days if you ask me. I don't trust them since the false Supermicro hack story (never retracted BTW) and I've seen several other bad stories from them since then.
So the idea is that Bloomberg, a company owned by a multibillionaire, published a story full of libel, and for some inexplicable reason none of the corporations damaged by that story sued them?
Or maybe ... the story is true, and those mentioned found it embarrassing, so they put out denials to the press and social media that will never have to be scrutinized (say, under testimonial oath in a deposition)?
These are publicly traded companies - everything they say is scrutinized.
What's not scrutinized is internal communications and logs, which would be fair game in discovery in event of a lawsuit against a media organization, which are uniquely suited to defend those types of lawsuits.
I was reminded of this recently by a fursuit company issuing a C&D over an accusation most people had forgotten about, for a tweet that was almost half a year old at that point.
24 hours later, the tweet from the target of the C&D has over 7000 retweets and the response from the company has almost 1400 quote retweets yelling at them. Many of the angry responses have as many retweets as the company's tweet.
Hopefully your CTO was.
Most likely, the story is true enough that the companies do not have a case for libel, even if specific details may be wrong, and the companies don't want a lawsuit because that opens then up to discovery proving that the foundational elements of the story are true.
Mark, for all the controversy surrounding your case and the obscene level of malice in the Japanese court system, reflected in its conviction rate, do you think there will ever be a way for you to tell your side of the story at length? Like a series of long format podcasts with a break down of the day by day, week by week kind of format?
Are there gag orders or something like that until the matter is resolved?
Because there are still so many questions left unanswered, I'm still wondering to this day who or what was behind that that 'Muscle group' thing offering to pay xx cents on the dollar per outstanding Bitcoin/fiat locked up on Gox. I always felt it was some of the members of The Foundation wanting to capitalize on the seizure of the funds and eventual reconciliation--which still has not happened.
I'd rather keep our old school Bitcoiner-style banter out of this on HN, rare for someone like me given my post history, because I honestly think you should really reach out to someone here with an independent media platform to get the ball rolling on being able to get your side of the story out there.
It's one that did put is back as a Community, Platform and Network many years, but it also showed just corrupt the legal systems is in many countries (US/Japan) and how they operate to what length they will go to get a conviction and 'settle' a matter to move on and try to contain a technology they entirely disregarded a year or two before.
The crazy thing is how much deeper it all goes and certainly has all the elements of a series of movies (at least a trilogy) if someone wanted to make it a script: DPR/Ross Silk Road case, those 2 Feds who stole the BTC, BTC-e seizure, Alexander Vinnik arrest in Greece alleging to be behind the MTGOX hack(s), variety Jones's arrest in Thailand. Not to mention guys like Gonzog, or Ver...
Honestly, after 10 years in Bitcoin its why I can't find or get excited about 95% of most movie, gamess or TV shows anymore. Nothing beats that last decade in Bitcoin, its been an amazing but incredibly wild ride!
Sidenote: Sorry to hear about all your troubles, our tempers flared and things got out of hand as a community (myself included) back then; but I want you to know that no one deserved what happened to you and your family--I also have friends in the BTC community that went to jail/prison due to State overreach, many of them irreparably scarred from it.
You look and seem much more healthy now then back then and I sincerely hope you found a way to make peace with it all and were able to move on with your life.
As someone who is only loosely aware of the story, is there a good place to learn more (I'm pretty sure I could spend countless nights researching this, I'm hoping for something like a detailed article or a particularly insightful forum post)? And I realize part of the issue is the story hasn't been told yet, but you still know a lot more than I do.
It really goes deep, and a lot of it was events as they happened in real time for those of in the Community. Bitcoin Talk Forum and reddit still have many of those threads if you want to go deep.
But here are some links I could find to you get familiarized with all of this [0] [1] at least until you decide to go further.
As you mentioned, so much of this has not been addressed and their are so many parties vying to hijack the narrative, which include Nation States and their respective agencies and bureaus withing them which is why I'd like to hear Mark's story (starting with being brought in for questioning by the Secret Service, FBI, and DHS) be told over a series of podcasts (the lowest barrier of entry with long format). I'm sure we could crowd source this with BTC to make it happen if he ever decides to do it.
I'm just not sure if Mark would be legally allowed to do that at this point because of the ongoing reconciliation process.
0: https://blockonomi.com/mt-gox-hack/
1: https://www.techspot.com/news/61603-weekend-tech-reading-mar...