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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

Just as a reminder about how Mt Gox played out - it looks like all the people who lost money on it will receive 1:1 fiat-denominated compensation for their losses, Mark Karpeles won't serve a day in prison, and is likely to walk away with ~3 billion worth of BTC[1].

Who'd have thought that failing to operate a bitcoin exchange is a thousand times more lucrative than actually operating one!

[1] If Mark owed you a bitcoin back in 2014, you're not going to get that bitcoin back. You're going to get somewhere between ~$200 and ~$600 back. He's going to keep the other $30,000.

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Edit: Looked deeper into it. It's a really weird story, where it looks like they got hacked (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/27/russian-c...), he tried to fake financial data to make it look like they had money, and he got caught. In the end, he's making more money off of lying and the original investors are screwed. That's really lame.

It's also unfortunate, because a lot of the vibe I get from crypto people I run into (more online than in-person), is survival of the cleverest, and anything is cool if you can get away with it. People I knew outside of crypto who are into it (more on the eng-side), are pretty cool, though and usually don't only trust Bitcoin and see most alt-coins as scams.

Nobody got paid yet. This is going to drag out for a long long time.

I also think the BTC-E issue is bigger and gives me reason to think Mark Karpeles wrongfully served jail time in Japan (for the reason that he served time, there could be other reasons if people like that kind of consequence).

Every crypto nut I have interacted with, will call you all sort of derogatory terms if you don't agree that web3 is the future and if a scam happens on any exchange, its because the user were stupid to trust them. Zero accountability for the scammers and fraudsters, it's always the "stupid" users fault.

Well I guess it depends upon how you define "nut". I know several people that are big into crypto (we call them "true believers"), and look at scams failing as good things for the long term health of the system, while not blaming the victims, and they don't get particularly offended if you don't believe in web3 or crypto.

If your definition of crypto nut is that they yell at you if you disagree with them, then yeah, by definition there will be no reasonable crypto nuts.

This information is out of date. The creditors took over the distribution process and are going to distribute the remaining bitcoin pro rata to creditors. Mark Karpales served about 2 years in prison.

> Mark Karpales served about 2 years in prison.

I do not think ha actually did serve any time. "he was sentenced to 30 months in prison, suspended for four years, meaning he will serve no time unless he commits additional offenses over the next four years." according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Karpel%C3%A8s .

Thanks for the correction. He was in jail for 10 months during the investigation, until he was finally released on bail. I think I conflated that with the sentence that he was ultimately handed (with some credit for time served).

So he did serve some time. I'm not sure though if there is a big distinction between jail and prison in Japan like there is in the US though.

https://www.newsbtc.com/news/mark-karpeles-from-mt-gox-out-o...

Because they took so long that the remaining assets value when up 300x ($100 - $30000)

Any way, believe it when I see it

That is assuming that the whole "we got hacked" is a complete fabrication. It is possible, but isn't it completely short sighted?

I mean, who would change places with him? His head has a price, and he will never be able to hide anywhere in the world or spend any of that money. He is going to live the rest of his life being watched by authorities all around the world and he will have thousands of people believing he is holding the stash.

The US government indicted the BTC-E founder, that indictment details the hack of many exchanges including Mt Gox.

Gox was fractional before Karpeles even bought it, due to this hack of bitcoin.

It's pretty clear by now that he didn't hack his own exchange (the hacker was caught a few years ago). But he did operate it while being insolvent, as well as operate a bot to trade against his users.

Either way, if restitution goes as currently planned, he's going to walk away from this an incredibly wealthy man.

Individuals will keep suing him, but ~3 billion dollars can buy a lot of lawyers, and it seems unlikely that the government has anything left to prosecute him with.

This isn't true at all. For the current expected payouts see the calculator at https://www.ozcoin.com.au

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