Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles quickly found himself in the crosshairs of the bitcoin community this year following a devastating collapse of the exchange he managed.
With hundreds of millions of dollars of investor funds lost, he’s easily become one of the most-hated public figures to ever get involved with the digital currency, and he’s now speaking up.
In an exclusive interview with the Wall Street Journal, Karpeles recounted the moments the exchange executed some of its final trades before shutting down completely.
“I was always worried: ‘What if all the bitcoins got stolen?” he told WSJ.
That’s certainly what seems to have happened, or something like it. February’s collapse saw the loss of over 700,000 bitcoins, with the company adding later that they discovered 200,000 bitcoins in a wallet that was presumed to have been old and empty. But it hasn’t helped the scores of investors left without a dime. And he doesn’t think any more will be recovered.
“As the company head, my mission was to protect customers and employees,” he said. “I’m deeply sorry. I’m frustrated with myself.”
The interview is his first run-in with the press since announcing Mt. Gox’s bankruptcy before a crowd of reporters in late February. It was conducted from the 33rd floor of his apartment in an upscale Tokyo neighborhood.
In effort to repay liquidators, Karpeles is trying to sell off domain names, such as bitcoins.com and akb.com.
It doesn’t seem like he’s through with business entirely, but he does recall some critical mistakes he made as head honcho of the world’s oldest and once largest bitcoin exchange.
“The weakest point of my company was management,” he said. “I failed to lay out appropriate corporate structures.”
Instead of focusing on the technological development of Mt. Gox (which grew exponentially following the sale from creator Jed McCaleb to Karpeles), Mark was tied up in meetings with lawyers and bankers.
And while he would like to see Mt. Gox rise from the ashes, he expressed concern with one group’s plan to revive the exchange. That group is Sunlot Holdings, and they’ve been a hot topic lately.
“To begin with, remaining customer money should not be touched,” he said.
Sunlot holdings is backed by former child-actor Brock Pierce, who now sits on the Bitcoin Foundation board.
And if anyone is looking to start their own bitcoin exchange, Karpeles has some simple advice:
“If anyone wants to start a bitcoin exchange, I would say, ‘Be sure to have 24-hour security guards.'”
Mozalin Cranz 
Gio 
Supertyler 
Underwun 
William Banks 
lifterd. 
sadsadddd 
Good. Now go kill yourself Karpeles.
You are so sad.
Mark Karpeles has a 33 floor apartment?? Where on earth did he find the money for that?? …oh fuck…
Do us a favor and put your 33 floors to good use and JUMP
I am sick and tired of hearing news stories about how Mt.Gox’s bitcoins were ‘stolen’ or ‘hacked’. Are all you news agencies missing something here? You need a password to unlock a walet ok. You can’t just steal bitcoins. You need a password. Karpeles would have had that password in his head or stored somewhere remotely. There is no way that he would have not understood the importance of keeping the password seperate from the wallets. What? do you think he just wrote it in a text file called password.txt and kept it with the wallets? How exactly did this ‘thief’ get the passwords? This is simply not accurate to say theft or hacked. Only someone with direct access to Marks passwords could ever have transferred any bitcoins from his wallet. So what is his explaination for that? He said “I was always worried: ‘What if all the bitcoins got stolen?” – well obviously he would have kept the passwords somewhere very safe right? so what really happened here?
WTF!? Seriously!! It’s a real shame when journalists simply regurgitate the obvious nonsense that Karpeles feeds them without questioning it or him properly. Is this writer aware that this man left France for Japan after receiving a fraud conviction related to Internet payment systems for which he spent some time in custody. Karpeles blogged about this incident in 2006 and I read the post myself shortly before he deleted it earlier this year.
Gawker records what was written there here http://gawker.com/does-mt-goxs-ceo-have-a-secret-history-of-online-payme-1534752110. Le Journal also references his mother talking about the incident.
When discussing Karpeles, journalists should (i) be referencing the well documented background facts about Karpeles such as this earlier fraud conviction (ii) be explaining that the only way a thief could steal these bitcoins in practice is if they obtained access to the private keys, which should have been impossible hence Karpeles likely sold the coins himself in the early days @ $0.50 each to support operations (iii) be referencing the actions of Gox that show they knew they had balance sheet problems for a very long time.
This piece sounds like it is fawning over a fallen hero ;0
dude, bitcoin news is wwf, its rigged but still fun…don’t be mad it…just cheer for the ‘good guys’ and realize that some bad guys might be good guys and some good guys might turn into bad guys.
The cryptocurrency industry isn’t full of crooks and pump and dump scammers which is precisely why Karpeles should be held to account for his outrageous actions.
so you are saying ‘ideal money’ was written by “satoshi”? http://sites.stat.psu.edu/~babu/nash/money.pdf
Thanks for interesting link. Re: ‘ideal money’ i doubt there is any such thing and simply see cryptocurrency as powerful technology like the Internet that can help transform aspects of our financial system and society for the better. Furthermore Satoshi’s vision and Bitcoin are just one instance of a cryptocurrency.
(music) everyone’s confused so everyone’s scared and angry.(/music)
ISN’T, wait what? What world are you living in?!
I like bitcoin and think it’s great. Just don’t trust anyone with your coins/keys unless you’re willing to loose it all! It’s not referred to as the digital wild west for nothing!