Four years ago, Mark Karpeles, CEO of Mt. Gox was charged with the disappearance of 850.000 Bitcoin. The controversial Chief Executive Officer of Mt. Gox has decided to apologize for his mistakes.
In one session AMA (from Ask Me Anything) at Reddit, Mark Karpeles tried to address some of the accusations against him over the way he handled the bankruptcy of Mt. Gox.
Below are some of his most interesting answers:
I did the best and tried to develop the system by running the largest exchange at that moment. He had big problems, but we did not stay there. For a while. In the end, the methods I chose to try to acquire Mt. Gox, ended up being inadequate, or simply wrong.
I know I did not handle the last, stressful days of Gox properly. I can only regret what happened.
The Mt. Gox launched 2010 in Tokyo, Japan, and was one of Bitcoin's first major exchanges in the world. Until 2014, Mt. Gox handled the 70% of Bitcoin's worldwide transactions when he filed for bankruptcy because of the lack of large volume of BTC.
Karpeles was of course blamed by all involved since he appeared to be making a huge fortune from the bankruptcy. Japanese bankruptcy laws state that creditors' claims are recorded at the value of the Japanese yen on date of bankruptcy and not in BTC.
With the rise of the BTC price from 2014 to date, even if all the debts are paid, they will still remain above 160.000 BTC in Mt. Gox estate, which is responsible for the distribution of debts to shareholders.
Karpeles said:
I don't want this billion dollars. From day one I never expected to get anything out of this bankruptcy.
On March, mentioned that Mt. Gox sold $400 million worth of cryptocurrencies. At that time there were many people who argued that the specific movement was the reason for the sharp decline in the price of Bitcoin, according to TNW.
