Mt Gox finds 200,000 ‘lost’ Bitcoins in old wallet

Mt Gox, the scandal-hit Bitcoin exchange, has found nearly a quarter of the Bitcoins it previously said were lost or stolen after uncovering 200,000 units of the virtual currency in an old digital file.

Formerly the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange, Tokyo-based Mt Gox filed for bankruptcy protection last month after losing about 750,000 Bitcoins belonging to customers and another 100,000 owned by the company – worth $495m at today’s price.

The discovery of the old wallet brings the number of Bitcoins still missing to roughly 650,000, down from about 850,000.

“[Mt Gox] had certain old­ format wallets which were used in the past and which, Mt Gox thought, no longer held any Bitcoins,” Mark Karpelès, chief executive of the exchange, said in a statement posted online.

He added that the old wallet, which was used before June 2011, held about 200,000 Bitcoins. They were moved to offline wallets for security reasons earlier this month.

The discovery brings the total number of Bitcoins owned by Mt Gox to about 202,000. The reason for the disappearance and the exact number of Bitcoins that disappeared is still under investigation, Mr Karpelès said.

Mt Gox is seeking a court-led restructuring, with debts of Y6.5bn ($64m) and assets of Y3.9bn.

The debacle left investors unable to access their Bitcoins angry and sparked a debate into how the digital currency is regulated, propelling Japan to the forefront of global interest in monitoring it more closely.

“It’s good they’ve found some of the Bitcoins but I think it was a badly run system that lost control of their Bitcoins,” said Jonathan Waller, an investor who works as a developer on other Bitcoin-related projects.

He added it was not clear what proportion of the recovered Bitcoins belonged to people such as himself who were waiting to see if their investment could be recovered.

The Japanese cabinet has said that Bitcoin should be classed as a commodity rather than a currency, and wants to prevent banks and securities houses from entering related businesses.

Japan has also considered the taxing of Bitcoin transactions as part of a tighter regulatory framework, in an attempt to avoid a repeat of the scandal that has engulfed Mt Gox.

The bankruptcy filing of Mt Gox, which had been among the most popular platforms to trade and store the virtual currency, exposed gaps in supervision that have propelled authorities into action.

Officials have said that they were unsure whether the disappearance of about 850,000 Bitcoins from Mt Gox’s vaults was a result of theft, fraud or mismanagement, or a combination of these.

Earlier this week, a California man identified by Newsweek as “Satoshi Nakamoto”, the semi-mythical founder of the virtual currency, issued an “unconditional” denial of the magazine’s story.

Newsweek’s attempt to unmask the creator of Bitcoin had caused a media storm earlier this month when the magazine claimed it was Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto, a 64-year-old Japanese American living in the suburbs of Los Angeles.