> occasionally I multiply my Mt Gox holdings by the current price of Bitcoin and imagine how life could be

I often have flashbacks to that one tweet I saw many many years ago saying „Bitcoin reaches USD parity“. I was considering investing a thousand bucks at that time, just for fun.

I would be 37 million dollars rich today!

Who am I kidding.

What would have actually happened is I would have sold everything once my money doubled to 2 USD/BTC, and then panicked seeing it rise and rise, bought in again right before a crash and sold everything with a huge loss.

So realistically, you should take what the Bitcoins you lost were worth at that time, and multiply it 2-3 times if you‘re lucky, and that‘s it.

Most of the stories of people getting rich with bitcoin are:

- people invested in the ecosystem, eg creators of exchanges etc

- true believers (rare)

- celebrities like the Winklevosses who actively invested large amounts of money with some kind of plan

- people who forgot a harddrive from 2010 with 100 bitcoins and found it again in 2018. (or like MtGox, where they were stuck in liquidation for so long that the assets are worth billions now)

If you‘re not in one of those groups, I think you realistically do not need to worry about having lost anything more than a few single digit multiples of your Bitcoins worth in dollars back then.

Cryptopia was hacked a year or two ago. I had a diversified portfolio if shitcoins, but no idea which.

They starting the legal process soon so I might be millionaire soon

Dogecoin is fucking killing it...don't ask me or my discarded hard drive during a health crisis how I know.

I am sorry for the situation and the way things and have expressed sorrow continuously, starting with the bankruptcy press conference, and on multiple occasions. I have been helping people who contacted me or who posted on reddit, been in touch with MtGoxLegal and other creditor groups, and generally tried to keep everyone aware of their rights and needed procedures to be into the bankruptcy. I also have made sure third parties wouldn't enter the process in order to benefit from it (see Brock Pierce for example) and still continue today to offer help on reddit to those in need.

I do not think me being involved in a new exchange would help make money for creditors. I have provided counseling to other exchanges who asked me to on how to avoid repeating what happened with MtGox and tried to push as much as possible for MtGox creditors to get as much as possible. When I was due to receive over a billion dollar as share holder in the bankruptcy I also made sure everyone knew about it because switching back to a civil rehabilitation needed the support for most creditors and wasn't something I could do (since I'm not a creditor myself).

But of course if I can help in something more I'd be happy to. You will likely receive more than you initially deposited into MtGox through the bankruptcy, but I do not know what you call "significant recompense."

Also most creditors I have been interacting with have been thankful for the help and I do not think that many people still direct much ill toward me, at least it doesn't feel that way anymore, but that may have to do with the lack of death threats and insults on Twitter and such. I'm hoping everyone will be eventually able to move on, but first the bankruptcy must end, and CoinLab is preventing exactly that from happening.

I have been choosing my words carefully, even going as far as avoiding voicing my own opinion here and instead linking to some fact checking from another MtGox creditor. I will however still say that CoinLab and more specifically Peter is clearly abusing his position and using stalling techniques to force MtGox and creditors to accept a settlement rather than having the whole process taking many more years, effectively taking everyone hostage for his own gain.

Staying silent will not do anything for creditors, and CoinLab clearly do not have creditors' benefit in mind. I do think this is important to point out.

As a counterpoint, I would like to thank you Mark for what you built, and the movement you started. You did change my life and the lives of many others, enabling us to build the future. Lessons were learned by many. NYKNYC.

We cannot change the past, and we must build for the future. I think when the dust settles, you will be remembered as a pioneer and economy builder.

Agreed. Those who fell at the beginning are those who paved the way. Mark is a hero. Nothing less.

Is this coordinated image rehabilitation or something?

You authoritatively confirmed that the account is who it says it is as your first involvement in this thread. Was that based on firsthand knowledge? I’m really suspicious about your involvement here and I’m starting to suspect someone figured out just how easily HN can be leveraged if the commentary remains civil and lionizes the right people late on a Friday night when everyone is looking the other way.

People who rescue children from fires are heroes. People who make amends for significant errors, after aggressively trying to obfuscate them for many years, have some measure of retroactive integrity. There’s a difference and while he certainly deserves credit, he’s quite obviously manipulating this discussion in real time (I’m not saying it, but I’m saying it, wink wink).

Call me cynical, call me uncivil, whatever, but what you just said is a giant pile of the absolute worst excrement to ever cross this site. I’m not even involved in this drama, I’ve never speculated on Bitcoin, I have no ill feelings for this person, he cost me nothing, but holy Moses is what you’re doing here one of the most transparent efforts I’ve ever seen.

The more this back room stuff goes on in crypto, where we are all subjected to very public he said she said spats and expected to choose who’s our hero in this adventure and navigate who’s more full of shit, the less claim cryptocurrency has to legitimacy. I’m amazed that’s not obvious to you.

Please assume good faith. I do not believe there is a image rehabilitation campaign, nor are nefarious forces trying to sway public opinion late Friday night. Don't waste too many brain cycles chasing ghosts. We all are just people trying to get by in life.

There is no conspiracy here :-)

That eased all my concerns. Thank you. I feel better.

Rasengan is Andrew Lee, cofounder of London Trust Media, parent company of Private Internet Access. He has been personal friends with Mark Karpeles since well before Mark's fraud was discovered. Here's a PR piece he put out when he hired Mark as CTO after he was let out of prison. Yes you read that right, an infamous fraudster who couldn't even be bothered to use version control on MtGox who lied day after day for years and who ran his business into the ground and was imprisoned for it was hired as a CTO for a major VPN company.

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/why-i-hired-mt-go...

Rasengan has an obvious bias here, you can call that whatever you want but whatever you call it, he's not a neutral third party. I'm not either, Mark Karpeles stole a great deal of money from me and many others on this site. Rasengan has in the past given this same spiel on HN trying to make Mark out to be some kind of victim of circumstance.

>People who make amends for significant errors, after aggressively trying to obfuscate them for many years, have some measure of retroactive integrity.

At no point has Mark Karpeles done anything at all that could objectively be described as making amends for anything. Jed McCaleb previously indicated that Mark Karpeles was aware from when he originally made the deal for buying most of MtGox that the exchange was already insolvent. He lied to users for years and claimed that MtGox had a cold storage system comprised of 3 geographically disparate locations, of which access to 2 were required to move funds out of cold storage and 95% of customer funds were kept out of the hot wallets. In reality that never existed, and Mark just continually kept emptying the cold wallets that were just stored in their office into the hot wallet. The hot wallet was compromised in a hack, Mark knew the hot wallet was wiped out in the hack, he didn't rotate keys, he just kept dumping our money into a known compromised address and never once bothered to check just how much money was missing until it was gone. The only saving grace was that Mark was so incompetent and blaise with managing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of other peoples money that he quite literally forgot about 200,000 BTC. If he had remembered it, there's no reason to believe that he wouldn't have just kept dumping it in and push the collapse back by another 6 months.

Since the collapse everything's been in the hands of the trustee for MtGox and Tibanne. If Mark Karpeles told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check.

Gox or Mark didn't steal any money from you, you lost the money you had left in the casino. While it might be true the casino lost it, it was no longer yours the moment you transferred it out of your own wallet. I'm sorry for your loss.

"I can’t give you your money, it isn’t here, it’s in Frank’s house and Joe’s house".

Thank you for posting this. I was aware of the bankruptcy press conference, though honestly (but perhaps incorrectly) perceived most of it as "My lawyer made me say this". I feel your message here which you posted even after all these years does convey true regret.

I agree with you on the idea of a new exchange. While it is a hopeful idea, ultimately I don't think that it would be very fruitful. In my opinion, it is about as far fetched as the idea of working with the US Government to get the feds seized from BTC-e to repay the creditors (because apparently the BTC-e folks were the ones who executed the Gox attack?). I assume you agree getting coins from the US Gov't is far fetched.

Thank you for highlighting CoinLab's (Peter's) actions. I am so very ready for the bankruptcy to be over, I can only imagine how ready you are to move on from it.

I appreciate the thoughtfulness you've given to your words. Please don't stay silent.

> You will likely receive more than you initially deposited into MtGox through the bankruptcy, but I do not know what you call "significant recompense."

I was one of those claimants who sold approximately the account value north of 1000 Bitcoins to bring myself in what I thought was a better position when all of your withdrawal methods were blocked. I attempted to withdraw BTC into BitcoinBuilder, but you guys had my account flagged for additional review from a previous TX I had made weeks ago. I had literally zero other options and you guys locked up all of my balance.

Some recompense could be given to now fiat claimants who sold all of their BTC holdings into USD _the day_ that Mt.Gox shut down. There were quite a handful of individuals who did with the same rationale this in the hours leading up to the website shutdown. I'm pretty sure they are the minority of claimant cases looking at /r/MtgoxInsolvency posts.

Today, the difference in market value those few hours for me would have been approximately been $7.9 MM vs. ~500k USD + penalties. There were zero guidance the days that you had your withdrawals blocked off, and any communication of what was going on especially in those few hours would have made such a difference in the 7 years that we/I had our money locked up.

Please look into these accounts that had this sort of activity _in the hours_ leading up to Mt. Gox's shutdown. If any group would be significantly impacted by any recompense, it would be us.

CoinLab is a joke. Calling his actions abusive is kind.

I originally started my HN account to ask what I should do when my cofounder screwed me out of $12.8 million I was owed as the result of the sale of our company that he forced me out of and sold without telling me. My username came from that era of my life. I cannot even begin to describe how different my life would be had my cofounder not done this. It is unlikely that I will ever again create something that valuable, and accordingly I have a profound sense of loss over it.

So speaking from personal experience...while your anger is completely justified, you have to let it go, or it will destroy you. It’s just one of those things - a random, traumatic event that instantly and irrevocably changes the trajectory of your life, that you can do nothing about. These are jarring reminders that the world is a cold and unfair place, that the universe is not in fact looking out for us, and that people are not “mostly good” as many of us were raised to believe. But holding grudges, even against people that have inflicted unimaginable trauma on you, only hurts you.

Yes you are correct. Thankfully, as mentioned, I have mostly moved on from this. This appears to be his first post on HN, so, I felt compelled to comment to make him aware that his presence in forums, etc can be upsetting to people.

And, while I don't think he should necessarily retreat from forums... I just hope that he is conscious of how his presence and words may affect people.

I really don't get how someone can casually screw someone out of such vast sums of money and not live in fear watching their back the rest of their life. They must really be confident the individual would remain mentally stable. Not everyone will just walk away quietly and meditate, some people will definitely try to find the best way to put a bullet in your head.

If you're going to screw someone, you should at least come up with some cover story that shifts the blame away from you, and even then you better hope the truth isn't discovered.

I was very angry at first, but yes, he knew that I was not the type of person that would put a bullet in his head. He didn’t do anything to shift blame - he couldn’t. My name was all over the patents the company held, so he couldn’t deny my participation. He simply stopped talking to me and then used his lawyers to attempt to silence me.

Unfortunately, karma just is not a thing. Among more than a dozen homes he owns are two mansions in California, each over 10k sq ft (at least one of which was paid for with my money), within about 10 minutes of each other. One is on a bluff overlooking the ocean, and the other is more inland where he rides horses with his wife, who is roughly half his age and who was married to someone else until it became obvious to her then-husband that she was pregnant with my business partner’s child. Ironically, among his other business ventures today is a Christian magazine/movie production company.

I will never see justice served upon him. He will continue to live a fabulous life and I, quite likely, won’t. But being angry over it does nothing for me.

The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

> while your anger is completely justified, you have to let it go, or it will destroy you

Cheers to you for this. I know I would not be able to do the same.

Why do you believe you will never be able to start another project worth millions? If you did it once, you can do it again.

You are even starting out ahead as you can impress investors with your past project!

I have been trying ever since this happened, and so far have only had marginal success. You never know, I suppose, but that project sold for $64 million to a multibillion dollar company (Equifax). It is statistically unlikely that I will ever create something that valuable again. I am now in the DeFi space, doing some interesting things, so there is a possibility - but life has taught me not to hold my breath.

> occasionally I multiply my Mt Gox holdings by the current price of Bitcoin and imagine how life could be.

While this obviously doesn't justify what happened with Mt Gox, there was plenty of time afterward to reinvest at significantly lower prices than today, so I don't think it's fair to attribute all those losses to him.

MtGOX was one of a few situations which would have led me to having a million in the bank if not for seemingly small changes. Alas, it didn’t happen, and honestly there were many other ways that it would have otherwise not happened. Sure its fun to multiply tens of bitcoins I once owned by the all time high, but this is about as effective as thinking about picking different lottery numbers. It would be nice if I got every coin back from mtgox, my balance would sell for something between a nice car and a nice house these days, but this is reality, reality has risks, and I made risky choices and got the results which I did.

The writing was on the wall months before the attack. Mt Gox's usability plummeted and rumors or pentesting circulated. Orders started experiencing increasing latency.

I watched that tower fall from a safe distance. I'm not saying it's your fault that you got dragged into the Bitcoin double spend attack, but it's simply part of the game. Easy come, easy go. Don't get caught up imagining fake money you never had. It will weight heavily on your psyche forever.

It’s not Marks foul. You have the money transferred to an exchange to mage a transaction not to hold it and wait for >40k. You would sold at 200,1000,10000.....

Get over it. You were the one who tried to get rich and failed. Just accept that and move on. Try again if you want to. But don't blame someone else for your risky investments.

This is a very thinly veiled threat.

> I assume you must have concerns for your own physical safety.

> I hope that you'll consider those of us who are still hurt by your negligence by choosing your words and presence carefully.

This is a clumsy threat and isn't really appropriate.

No threat intended. In my third paragraph I attempted to empathize with him. Yes, he cost me money but he is still human.

I truly do think it must be scary for him. I don't know of your involvement in Bitcoin at the time, but there was a much higher percentage of 'not good people' involved then. In the months after the Gox news originally broke, many people were discussing Mark's safety. I still wonder about his safety every time there is a major milestone in the Gox case - and will again when the case finally settles.

In my final paragraph I communicated that Mark's presence here, and the way he communicates will affect members of this community - especially important since this seems to be his first post here.