Finance
The Fight Over Mt. Gox’s Bitcoin Stash
Hundreds of thousands of Bitcoins went missing from the busted exchange. Who gets the leftover digital currency?
An April 7, 2017, photo shows a sign informing customers that Bitcoin can be used for payment at a store in Tokyo.
Photographer: Toru Yamanaka/Getty ImagesThis article is for subscribers only.
Mark Karpelès learned in June that he’s probably not going to become a Bitcoin billionaire. He calls that good news. If it had happened, he says, he would have been “one of the most hated people on Earth.” And Karpelès already has plenty of people who are angry with him.
He presided over the collapse of Japan-based Mt. Gox—once the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange—and he’s now on trial in Tokyo for embezzlement and manipulation of records. But in a weird twist, it had seemed that Japan’s bankruptcy rules also put Karpelès, who is French, in line to receive a huge windfall.