Mark Karpelès, ex-CEO MtGox – AMA | Hacker News Reader

Mark Karpelès, ex-CEO MtGox – AMA

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84 pointsStjerrild25 comments

> Japanese bankruptcy law has a particularly nasty outcome here, and I want to address this up front. As creditors claims were registered, those claims were registered in the valuation of Japanese Yen on the bankruptcy date. That's the only way Japanese bankruptcy law can work (most bankruptcy laws around the world operate this way for that matter). This means that the claims can be paid back in full, and there will still be over 160,000 bitcoin and bitcoin cash in assets in the Gox estate. The way bankruptcy law works is that if there are any assets remaining after the creditors have been paid in full, then those assets are distributed to shareholders as part of the liquidation.

> That's the only way any bankruptcy law can reasonably work. And yet, in this case, it produces an egregiously distasteful outcome in that the shareholders of MtGox would walk away with the value of over 160,000 bitcoin as a result of what happened.

Hilarity ensues.

That's amazing. He screwed up and lost so much of the customers' money the company so much they had to go into bankruptcy, which pegged the company's debts at the bitcoin-to-yen rate of 2014. The company has over 200,000 bitcoins.

So the rise in value of bitcoin has made Mt Gox extremely valuable in bankruptcy (possibly more valuable than if it were properly managed from the beginning) and now Mark Karpeles is a billionaire. Is that a correct understanding?

Yes.

The fact that this needs to be said on the first comment is, to my mind, remarkable and why I've never been a fan of Bitcoin:

"Good luck going forward. Considering that you could probably single handedly crash bitcoin with what you have in your wallet... Uh... Please don't?"

turns out that if you build something that requires zero trust, you end up not being able to trust anybody. who knew

He already did:

https://www.coindesk.com/mt-gox-trustee-sells-400-million-bi...

The market was recovering from the crash when this happened, and it went down the toilet again right after that.

Funnily it recovered (to die soon after again), but we have seen the Mt Gox weight in action already.

Bitcoin's caused some hilarious lessons in what "decentralized" actually means. Bitcoin isn't controlled by some nasty evil central bank; it gets to be controlled by a mostly random collection of maybe intelligent and definitely lucky people with no oversight whatsoever.

That sums it up as far as I can tell. The narrative of, "I don't want/deserve this huge windfall I'm receiving is beyond absurd." The solution seems pretty simple. Compensate those who suffered losses because of the mistakes your business made. Duh.

He says that he would like to do so, but can't, because he doesn't have access to the coins: "I don't have control over the Bitcoins in the MtGox estate, however myself as well as many creditors are pushing for the trustee not to sell until a decision is reached for civil rehabilitation." and "The trustee was appointed by the bankruptcy court and I have no control over this process at this point. I only wish to see bitcoins returned to all MtGox creditors as soon as possible."

If you can believe what he wrote here, he’s not happy with how this turned out and he’s working to make the customers as whole as he can. If so I have to respect the guy at least a bit, since it sounds like he could pretty easily walk away from this as astoundingly wealthy man, all legally acquired.

That's just for the bankruptcy case. There are other cases/class actions on the way.

Bankruptcy in the US (which is of course different than Japanese bankruptcy) may discharge those contingent liabilities as well, IIRC from law school.

> So the rise in value of bitcoin has made Mt Gox extremely valuable in bankruptcy (possibly more valuable than if it were properly managed from the beginning) and now Mark Karpeles is a billionaire.

Yes it has made MtGox valuable but not made Mark Karpeles a billionaire.

I can't speak for Japanese law but bankruptcies normally have an overseer, in this case a trustee. They control the assets of the bankrupt companies and decide on how the creditors are paid. Creditors include customers, Mark Karpeles, his investors and debtors, if any. So, customers can still approach the MtGox trustee about the payment.

To reiterate I am not a lawyer, but in most cases they might be able to file a suit against the MtGox estate too.

He's stated he that he intends to avoid the outcome that ends with him becoming a billionaire. https://www.coindesk.com/mt-gox-ceo-dont-want-bankrupt-bitco...

I wonder how many people want to find this guy for personal vendetta's. His life must be a living hell

Violence solves nothing. He can't even access the bitoins yet to give them back, even if forcefully held at gunpoint or tortured.

Just because it solves nothing does not mean anything.

A woman just yesterday shotup the Youtube offices because her videos were demonetized. Yes, she probably had mental illness as well but I can only imagine how much more some people have against Mark Karpeles.

> Just because it solves nothing does not mean anything.

I feel that it does mean something. While people may want Karpeles to pay for what happened implying violence is OK to "settle the score" is wrong. Those that cause the violence will then spend time incarcerated and they still wont get back their bitcoins or the value of their bitcoins. Correct me if I am wrong, but in the U.S prisoners can only earn so much money while incarcerated.

To me the lesson from all of this is, this is why financial regulations exist. Many nations have gone through this same thing with their own currencies, and the end result is something like the US FDIC, where properly regulated banks have their balances backed up by the federal government and if the bank goes out of business everyone gets their money back.

Many people I know who are opposed to this kind of regulatory structure have invested in some way in BitCoin due to their lack of regulatory structure, and some of them have been burned by it.

You can hate the guy for his mistakes, but ultimately this would have been far less likely to happen with a stable currency backed up by a stable regulatory body.

It's ironic because cryptocurrencies were made to eliminate third party risk.

Another take away from mtgox was to keep your coins on your local, not on an exchange.

I don't really understand his sentiment. It's not like he's stealing a billion dollars from charity. The people who lost out will get their money. They were speculators at the end of the day, and I don't really have much sympathy for them with regard to their loses of 10x gains.

I guess he might still be facing jail time or threats from the the community, so he has to put on some type of sympathetic face.

Is coinjar related in anyway to mtGox?

Interesting that he makes an AMA appearance, roughly a month after the BBC File on 4 (top quality investigatory journalism) piece: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09tdyjz

He's been active on Reddit for years (he deleted history). Doing the AMA is related to the recent actions of the trustees to liquidate a large portion of Bitcoin. The amount liquidated is apparently enough to reimburse account holders with the USD value of the BTC lost at the time. Mark has no control over the trustee actions.

The details of the liquidation are unclear. It's reported that they weren't sold directly on the market, but nevertheless extra supply has almost certainly had a dramatic effect on Bitcoin price. It's one of very a few examples of a particular action/event having a direct impact on price.

https://i.redd.it/l578yxh3c3xz.jpg

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