We’ve all done it: checked the pockets of those long-forgotten jeans or jackets to find a surprise €10 note or two.
But Mt Gox may have just beaten that, claiming that it found around 200,000 “forgotten” bitcoins on March 7th, a week after the Tokyo-based digital currency exchange filed for bankruptcy protection in the US. The haul would be worth just under $120 million at today’s prices.
In a statement on its website, the company claimed the coins were discovered in an oldformat wallet that it thought no longer contained any of the currency. Following the bankruptcy proceedings, Mt Gox said it rescanned the old wallets and made the discovery.
“On March 7th, 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 said.
However, the move hadn’t gone unnoticed, with online sleuths noting around 200,000 bitcoins moving through the crypto-currency exchange after the bankruptcy filing.
Mt Gox said it moved the coins to offline wallet, citing security reasons.
“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,” it said.
The exchange, headed by 28-year-old Frenchman Mark Karpeles, filed for bankruptcy protection in the US earlier this month, saying it lost nearly all the 850,000 bitcoins it held - 750,000 bitcoins belonging to its customers and 100,000 of its own - worth some $500 million at today's prices. The company has blamed hackers for the loss, but in its statement said the reasons for their disappearance and the exact number of bitcoins lost is still under investigation.
In light of the latest discovery, the current total has now has now been revised to about 650,000 missing bitcoin.
But many of Mt Gox’s 127,000 creditors, who feared they had lost their investments, are sceptical about what the exchange has said happened to the bitcoins it had. In its bankruptcy filing, Mt Gox also said $28 million was “missing” from its Japanese bank accounts.
A US judge in Chicago overseeing a class action against Mt Gox yesterday revised a previous order, allowing some of the exchange’s bitcoin movements to be tracked.
Bitcoin is bought and sold on a peer-to-peer network independent of central control. Capped at 21 million bitcoins, its value soared last year, and the total worth of bitcoins is now about $7 billion. (Additional reporting: Reuters)
