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Iconic ‘Mt. Gox, Where is Our Money?’ Sign Is Up for Auction

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One cold February morning in 2014, Kolin Burges stood outside Mt. Gox’s Tokyo office, clutching a handwritten cardboard sign and demanding answers from the bitcoin exchange’s CEO, Mark Karpeles, about his missing tokens.

Eleven years later, the iconic sign, emblematic of crypto’s first major financial scandal, is being auctioned on Scare.City with a reserve price of 4.5 BTC ($383,000). The sale starts later Friday and ends April 3.

«At the time, it didn’t even cross my mind it could become valuable,» Burges said in an interview with CoinDesk in Hong Kong. «I thought maybe I’d write a book someday, but the sign itself never seemed important. It’s remarkable how things have evolved.»

Burges had flown from London to Tokyo after Mt. Gox, then the world’s largest bitcoin exchange, mysteriously froze withdrawals.

«I woke up one morning and knew I had to go to Tokyo,» Burges recalled. «I didn’t really have a detailed plan. I just knew I had to be there.

«When the withdrawal didn’t arrive, I started feeling this growing sense of dread. At first, I wasn’t 100% sure, but as time went on, it became increasingly clear something was very wrong.»

His impromptu protest quickly gained international media attention, even attracting the notice of mainstream financial press like the Wall Street Journal.

Burges recalled those initial days in Tokyo as dreamlike and almost otherworldly.

«The moment I confronted Karpeles was intense,» he remembered. «I demanded answers, but he just brushed me off, blaming technical issues. It felt surreal, standing there in the snow, knowing something major was unfolding.»

As Burges protested outside Mt. Gox’s offices, the exchange’s attempts to mitigate the public fallout became increasingly evident.

«Mt. Gox kept dangling hope, but everyone could see the situation spiraling out of control,» Burges said. «They even invited us inside to protest privately. Anything to remove us from public view. It was ridiculous and desperate.»

Burges recalls how over drinks, someone from Mt. Gox, whom he declined to name, privately pressured him to cut it out.

«At one point, Mt. Gox representatives met me secretly, warning that continued protests would cause the exchange to collapse and everyone would lose their bitcoins,» he said. «That conversation made it clear they knew more than they admitted, and the situation was far worse than publicly acknowledged.»

Then, Burges recollects, one representative tried paying for their drinks with a Mt. Gox credit card — and it was declined.

«It was an ominous sign their banking relationships were unraveling,» Burges said.

Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy in February 2014, days after Burges started his protest.

Seven years later, Karpeles was found innocent of embezzlement in a Tokyo court, while receiving a suspended sentence for manipulating data.

Last September, Karpeles set up a new crypto exchange, EllipX. He also established a crypto ratings company called Ungox in 2022.

In an interview with CoinDesk on the sidelines of Korea Blockchain Week in August 2024, Karples said that if he had modern blockchain analytical tools in 2014, and third-party custodians, Mt. Gox «wouldn’t have happened.»

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‘No DOGE in D.O.G.E.’, Says Dogecoin Proponent Elon Musk

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Faint hopes of dogecoin (DOGE) being included in the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E.) were dented on Sunday as the department’s figurehead Elon Musk squashed any plans of adding the memecoin.

«There are no plans for the government to use dogecoin or anything,” Musk said during a speech at the America PAC town hall in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

“I was going to call it Government Efficiency Commission, but that’s a super boring name. Then the internet said it needs to be the Department of Government Efficiency. I was like Internet is right,” he added.

DOGE prices are down 3.5% in the past 24 hours, in line with a broader market drop. While there have been no firm plans to include the token in the controversial non-governmental agency, its introduction in August had sparked several namesake tokens and birthed the start of a multi-month rally in dogecoin.

The official site even sported a dogecoin logo for a few hours on the day after Trump’s inauguration, giving more credence to rumors of the joke token playing a role in the new agency.

D.O.G.E seeks to make government spending of taxpayer money more efficient while streamlining departments that handle spending. It has saved an estimated $130 billion after a formal start in January, data shows, with an average $840 saving for taxpayers.

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Japan Mulls Reclassifying Crypto as a ‘Financial Product’ to Curb Insider Trading: Report

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Japan’s Financial Services Agency (FSA) plans to reclassify cryptocurrencies as financial products under new rules, aimed at curbing insider trading in the digital asset market, per a Nikkei report on Sunday.

The move comes as part of a broader effort to strengthen oversight in Japan’s crypto ecosystem, which has witnessed growing adoption alongside a rise in fraudulent activities.

The FSA intends to submit amendments to the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act (FIEA) to Japan’s parliament as early as 2026, following a detailed review conducted by experts behind closed doors.

Cryptocurrencies are currently categorized as a «means of settlement» under the Payment Services Act, a designation that has governed their use primarily as a payment tool rather than as investment vehicles.

However, this existing classification has left gaps in regulatory oversight, particularly concerning activities like insider trading.

As such, specific details about the insider trading rules — such as what constitutes insider information in the crypto context or the penalties for violations — have not yet been disclosed, leaving room for further clarification as the proposal takes shape.

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Bitcoin Nears $81K; XRP, ADA Slide as Traders Brace For Tariff War Ahead

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Bitcoin (BTC) traders just over $81,500 in Asian morning hours Monday as a weekend slide saw major tokens lose momentum on last week’s brief rally.

XRP and Cardano’s ADA led losses among majors with a 5% drop in the past 24 hours, with Solana’s SOL, dogecoin (DOGE) and ether (ETH) down between 2-3%.

The CoinDesk 20, a measure of the performance of the largest digital assets, is down 2.6%

Weekly inflows to the BTC ETF finished last week at $196 million, according to SoSoValue, while ETH ETFs had a net outflow of just over $8 million.

Stock markets opened lower Monday, their fourth consecutive day of decline, as investors around the globe brace for President Donald Trump’s upcoming announcement of new tariffs, set to be revealed on April 2, amid growing fears of a global trade war’s economic fallout.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index was down 1.7% in the morning session, while the Nikkei 225 was down 3.8%, and Korea’s KOPSI index in the red by 3% as export-heavy economies worry about market access to the U.S.

Futures for U.S. and European stock indexes also fell. In contrast, safe-haven assets like gold reached an all-time high, and U.S. Treasury yields dropped due to increased demand.

Globally, portfolio managers are adopting cautious strategies, either reducing risk or avoiding large investments, unsettled by the impending «reciprocal tariffs» and their potential economic toll.

Elsewhere in crypto, data from Tokenomist.ai shows that $751.2 million in unlocks are scheduled this week, including SUI and DYDX, putting the weekly unlock cycle in the middle of the pack. Unlocks are scheduled to pick up in May, when roughly $4.4 billion (at current market prices) in tokens will be unlocked.

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