Mt.Gox continues to impress the Bitcoin world with their incompetence, as they announced Friday that they had found around 200,000 Bitcoins in an old format wallet which they first had forgotten about and then believed would be empty. It can also be easy to forget that you have $120 million worth of cryptocurrencies lying around, why would any of the board members, financial advisors or maybe the accountant be aware of that.
Users from the bitcoin community had noticed that coins were moving through Mt.Gox after their bankruptcy filing in February, which Mark Karpeles, CEO of Mt.Gox, later explained to be due to the old format wallet that they found. Mt.Gox officially stated:
“On March 7, 2014, MtGox Co., Ltd. confirmed that an old format wallet which was used prior to June 2011 held a balance of approximately 200,000 BTC,”
The statement also said that the Bitcoins had been moved from online to offline wallets for security reasons on March 14-15th. “These bitcoin movements, including the change in the manner in which these coins were stored, had been reported to the court and the supervisor by counsels,” the statement said.
More than 127,000 users had either funds or Bitcoins in Mt.Gox when it filed for bankruptcy and seeing them moving around large amounts of Bitcoins made them very skeptical about ever seeing any funds again. Mt.Gox also reported to having lost $28 million from their Japanese bank accounts, showing that the company at no point had been able to run a business so large.
“Today in court we got relief … specifically to track the 180,000 bitcoins, which we’ve been monitoring. Hours later, Mt. Gox claimed it “found” these bitcoins … it appears Mt. Gox realized we were close and decided to acknowledge that it owned these 180,000-200,000 bitcoins,” Steven L. Woodrow, Partner at Edelson law firm told Reuters.
Hopefully this will be the beginning of finding missing funds to fully pay back the users that lost funds and coins with Mt.Gox.