[HN Gopher] Mt. Gox CEO Karpeles Reveals Details of 2014 Collaps...
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Mt. Gox CEO Karpeles Reveals Details of 2014 Collapse and Japanese
Detention
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 65 points
Date : 2025-12-24 16:21 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bitcoinmagazine.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bitcoinmagazine.com)
| optimalsolver wrote:
| "So you're telling me there's a financial exchange for Magic The
| Gathering players? How do I put all my money in this?"
|
| -Someone in 2010
| djaouen wrote:
| Don't joke: I once knew a kid who invested all his savings in a
| company because he liked computer games; that company was
| Nvidia!
| versavolt wrote:
| Indeed, obscene wealth is never funny
| mistrial9 wrote:
| bet he won't return your phone call now !
| djaouen wrote:
| We fell out of contact long before Nvidia blew up: hope
| he's doing OK!
| ekropotin wrote:
| That's cool, but kids usually don't have a lot of savings.
| mothballed wrote:
| Passing KYC for a brokerage is also a challenge nowadays,
| especially if your parents have the paperwork.
|
| When I was a kid I walked into a bank, opened an account
| with no ID and no parent permission, and that was that (I
| encouraged a friend to do it as well, their overbearing dad
| raged at the bank after he found out but even then it
| wasn't closed). Can't imagine that's even possible anymore.
|
| Of course it wasn't that long ago there were bearer shares.
| You could just hand a kid a physical piece of paper, and
| that was that, they owned part of the company. Bearer
| shares were another thing eliminated after the FATF went on
| their sadistic attack on privacy and self custody of many
| forms of financial instruments, eliminating one of the
| easiest ways for kids to handle investments directly in
| their hands.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| Nowadays you cannot even digitally transfer 15k EUR from
| your own bank account to your own brokerage without
| answering invasive questions, 15k EUR which had been
| taxed at least once already. Oligarchs, dictators, high
| figure politicians, and white collar criminals don't seem
| to have problems with money transfers though.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| As one of those people, the original meaning behind the name
| wasn't widely known. Plus, the dozen or so bitcoins I bought at
| <$1-10/coin were probably going to end up worthless, so
| preventing their loss wasn't a particularly big concern.
| le-mark wrote:
| This was exactly the thought process too. If I could send 8
| characters back in time to myself they'd be "BTC 100K".
| Loughla wrote:
| Dear Loughla,
|
| Keep the Bitcoin. The pot you'll buy with all 10 of them is
| mostly seeds and stems.
|
| From, Very upset future Loughla
| mcculley wrote:
| A lot of people seem to still use the service that was first
| hosted at airbedandbreakfast.com despite an unwillingness to
| rent an airbed.
| ggambetta wrote:
| I want my 5 Bitcoin back :_(
| wmf wrote:
| I think this article undersells his criminality; "falsifying
| records" is a pretty kind way of saying he covered up insolvency
| and massively manipulated the Bitcoin market.
| pimlottc wrote:
| It's a complete puff piece. Poor guy, surrounded by crooked and
| incompetent people. 80,000 bitcoin just disappeared somehow!
| Oops! Fortunately he's sleeping better and shredded now. Love a
| story with a happy ending!
| Analemma_ wrote:
| PR campaigns to rehabilitate white-collar criminals so they
| can resume their activities are an old practice, but have
| been supercharged by the internet and the ability to use
| oppositional culture war framing to get people on your side.
| Elizabeth Holmes and Martin Shkreli are both out of prison
| and running big rehab campaigns, and Sam Bankman-Fried is
| clearly angling for a Trump pardon (see his mom's big open
| letter and all the submarine stories lately about how "nobody
| actually lost any money at FTX! what was the crime??")
|
| It's especially big in crypto because the whole community has
| a conspiratorial "the System is against us" mindset, and if
| you can successfully tap into that and convince people "I was
| targeted by The Man, man" all your crimes can be washed away.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| AFAIK Elizabeth Holmes is still in prison?
| mkl wrote:
| Elizabeth Holmes is still incarcerated.
| https://www.businessinsider.com/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-
| fo...
| mvkel wrote:
| Time heals all wounds, even self-inflicted ones. I don't sense
| much remorse from this guy.
| ilamont wrote:
| The article mentions he was convicted of falsifying records. Kind
| of surprised Japan lets foreigners with criminal records stay in
| the country.
|
| And:
|
| _At shells.com, his personal cloud computing platform, he's
| quietly developing an unreleased AI agent system that hands
| artificial intelligence full control over a virtual machine:
| installing software, managing emails, and even handling purchases
| with a planned credit card integration. "What I'm doing with
| shells is giving AI a whole computer and free rein on the
| computer", a brilliant idea, really. AI agents on steroids._
|
| Like managing other people's crypto, it seems like an idea that
| could actually blow up your face.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Kind of surprised Japan lets foreigners with criminal records
| stay in the country.
|
| Many countries have no issue with that, serving time is
| considered enough of a punishment. The idea of (especially
| mandatory) deporting of criminals is relatively new, driven
| primarily by the far-right.
|
| IMHO it is unethical for two reasons - first, it violates the
| principle of every human being equal under the law because
| clearly non-citizens have a second punishment on top, second
| because in many cases (although not in this one) the target
| country isn't equipped to deal with serious criminals - that's
| how the US got MS-13 and other gangs causing trouble in South
| America in the first place.
| anonymous908213 wrote:
| Deporting criminals is in no way a new concept. In fact, it
| used to be commonplace to deport your own citizens, not just
| foreigners. The modern nation of Australia exists as a result
| of such a policy! Japan will certainly deport you for drug-
| related offenses or violent crimes, but like most places,
| white collar crime is not treated as "real crime", even
| though the impacts are usually more severe than a simple
| shoplifting or robbery.
|
| Incidentally, if Germany had deported a foreigner who led an
| attempted coup d'etat, perhaps it would have saved tens of
| millions of lives. The things people get away with a slap on
| the wrist for...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Deporting criminals is in no way a new concept.
|
| Whoops. Yeah, worded the original post badly. My intent was
| that it is relatively new that this is a policy under
| active (and heated) discussion.
|
| > In fact, it used to be commonplace to deport your own
| citizens, not just foreigners. The modern nation of
| Australia exists as a result of such a policy!
|
| Which just proves my last point... it's in almost all
| scenarios really really bad for the destination country.
| The Australian Indigenous people have been driven to the
| point of extinction by that policy.
|
| > Incidentally, if Germany had deported a foreigner who led
| an attempted coup d'etat, perhaps it would have saved tens
| of millions of lives.
|
| German here. I don't think it would have changed much.
| Sure, Hitler was undoubtedly charismatic... but even the
| most charismatic demagogue needs a desperate populace. If
| it weren't Hitler, someone else would have risen - _a lot_
| of powerful interests were aiming for the final collapse of
| the Weimar Republic, which is part of the reason why Hitler
| got off with a slap on the wrist, and part of the reason
| why he did get elected legitimately a decade later.
| killingtime74 wrote:
| Nit pick, Australia was founded on transportation, not
| deportation. Australia was not a foreign country until many
| years after.
| ilamont wrote:
| > Many countries have no issue with that, serving time is
| considered enough of a punishment. The idea of (especially
| mandatory) deporting of criminals is relatively new
|
| Paul McCartney would like to have a word with you.
|
| Not just Japan. For decades, SE Asian countries such as
| Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia have deported foreign
| convicts upon release and applied re-entry bans. It's not a
| new thing driven by right-wing politicians.
| my_throwaway23 wrote:
| Over 10 years of providing details and documents, but still
| waiting for my 0.75 BTC.
| stavros wrote:
| Didn't you get it back? They sent me a portion of mine last
| year.
| edfletcher_t137 wrote:
| Working with Andrew Lee on vp.net, who maliciously imploded
| Freenode some years ago. Birds of a feather...
| rpcope1 wrote:
| Oh he's the one that caused the Libera split? How am I not
| surprised.
| kbenson wrote:
| Small nitpick with the title, because I still find it humorous
| all these years later, but it's not "Mt. Gox" like Mount Gox,
| it's MTGOX, which stands for Magic The Gathering Online Exchange,
| as it started out as a trading platform for that, and adopted
| bitcoin early as a way to facilitate trades of the cards without
| cash.
| anonymous908213 wrote:
| It was literally branded Mt. Gox. In the logo and everything.
| Also, he had already shuttered the MTG project and simply re-
| used the dormant mtgox domain.
| gruez wrote:
| The Wikipedia page agrees with you as well:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox
| anonnon wrote:
| There's some discussion about potential Citogenesis here: h
| ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mt._Gox#Possible_citogene
| ...
| pessimizer wrote:
| > More importantly, McCaleb replied to my email. In
| response to my question "Did anyone ever actually trade
| card for card or money for card on Mtgox.com?", he
| replied "yeah they did". I've asked him some followup
| questions on dates & volumes & closure reason, but I
| guess that settles that... Does anyone recall the OTRS
| procedure for storing emails from primary sources? It's
| been years since I've last done it. --Gwern (contribs)
| 20:36 17 February 2014 (GMT)
| rpcope1 wrote:
| I like how this paints Karpeles, the Ripple guy and Roger Ver as
| seemingly upstanding individuals who didn't do anything wrong.
| mrkramer wrote:
| The guy was running hosting company which sold web domain to the
| Silk Road guy and then the Russian dude who run BTC-e exchange
| hacked his exchange(which was by the way sold to him by the
| Ripple founder). This is like some cheesy crime movie. Tell me
| about Bitcoin's circular economy and his bad luck or to be more
| precise incompetence. This guy basically blew away billions of
| dollars of people's money not knowing what the hell he was
| actually doing or who he was dealing with.
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(page generated 2025-12-24 23:01 UTC)