Mt. Gox Founder Jed McCaleb Clears Name, Says He Never Met Karpeles

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Mark Karpeles, former CEO of Mt. Gox, just might be one of the most despised individuals in the crypto-coins community.

Under his watch, hundreds of millions worth of dollars in bitcoins went missing, with some investors losing their life savings in the matter of a few weeks.

But before Mt. Gox became the largest bitcoin exchange in the world, it was started by someone other than Mark Karpeles. And the man who created it, Jed McCaleb, is keen to clear his name of involvement with regard to the Mt. Gox collapse.

Interviewed by Ars Technica, McCaleb said he was no longer involved with Gox operations by the time things went south earlier this year, noting that the extent of his relations with the company include a twelve percent arranged when he sold the site to Mark Karpeles in 2011.

But he says he’s never met Karpeles in person.

“I met [Mark Karpeles] I think on bitcointalk.org,” McCaleb said. “The Bitcoin community was very small at that time and I asked him to do some software development for me. He did that task and I was looking for someone else to run Mt. Gox so I could focus on other things. We discussed the possibility of him buying Mt. Gox from me and I ended up selling it to him in 2011.”

McCaleb notes that he himself lost about $50,000 worth of the digital currency when the exchange announced its insolvency.

In addition, he says what Mt. Gox became code-wise was totally different following the 2011 sale.

“It is my understanding that Mark also rewrote the entire codebase sometime in 2011 shortly after the sale and none of my code remained in use. Aside from the sale, I have never received any distributions or profits from Mark.”

Months following the collapse of the exchange, McCaleb, like many of us, still doesn’t know what really happened.

“The community deserves to find out the truth, and I am going to do what I can to help. Ultimately, with so many new positive projects being launched every day, Bitcoin will be able to show the world that we will not only recover, but grow stronger.”

Today, McCaleb is working on something different.

He calls it the “Secret Bitcoin Project”, and well, it’s a secret — so it’ll be some time until we properly find out about it.

To read the full interview with Jed McCaleb at Ars Technica, follow this link.

[textmarker color=”C24000″]Source[/textmarker] Ars Technica