Photo Kolin Burges, one of the most outspoken creditors of the failed Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, protesting in February 2014. “I am disturbed by the amount of money which the bankruptcy process has burned through,” Mr. Burges said. $2,411,412,137,427.
That figure — $2.4 trillion for those with an untrained eye for very large numbers — is in the same ballpark as the annual economic output of France.
It is also exactly the amount that people around the world claim they lost when Mt. Gox, the Tokyo-based virtual currency exchange, collapsed into bankruptcy in 2014, after huge, unexplained losses of the volatile digital currency Bitcoin.
As with most of the people who lost money with Bernard L. Madoff, the investment manager who was convicted of running a Ponzi scheme , most of those who put their Bitcoin in Mt. Gox will be disappointed: The Japanese trustee overseeing the case said on Wednesday that only $91 million in assets has been tracked down to distribute to claimants — a small portion of the more than $500 million in assets that Mt. Gox claimed it had in the weeks before it went bankrupt in February 2014, and a tiny portion of the amount that claimants have requested.
The giant gaps between those numbers are an indication, if nothing else, of the sheer number of dishonest people who have been drawn to the fiasco around Mt. Gox and Bitcoin. They are also the latest reminders of the topsy-turvy nature of the digital-currency realm. A currency designed to bring computer precision and traceability to money has been marked by multiple unsolved mysteries swirling around it.
Journalists and others have made many unsuccessful attempts to determine the true identity of the creator of the Bitcoin technology, a programmer or group of programmers going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto.
Bitcoin experts and […]
