In 2013, if you traded bitcoin, you almost certainly traded it on Mt. Gox. The Tokyo exchange — which began life, true story, as a marketplace for Magic: The Gathering cards — handled around seventy percent of all Bitcoin transactions on Earth. It was the bank, the vault, and the front door of the entire experiment.
In February 2014 it stopped processing withdrawals. Then it stopped answering. Then it stopped existing. Roughly 850,000 bitcoin were gone — about 750,000 of them belonging to customers — siphoned out over years by attackers while the books said everything was fine. The figure at the top of this page is what that pile is worth now, updated hourly, which the Bureau acknowledges is a cruel feature on this particular file.
CEO Mark Karpelès was arrested in Japan, convicted in 2019 of falsifying data, and acquitted of embezzlement — the courts concluding, roughly, that he had presided over the disaster rather than engineered it. About 200,000 BTC were later found in an old wallet, which is the only time in this Archive that finding a wallet made the story sadder, because it defined exactly how much would never follow.
Then came the wait, and the wait is the story. Creditors filed claims in 2014. Repayments began in July 2024 — ten years later. The current deadline for distributions is 31 October 2026. In between, the people owed coins at roughly US$500 apiece watched the price climb two orders of magnitude while their claims crawled through Japanese civil rehabilitation. Some of them are being repaid in bitcoin, which means the collapse accidentally produced the most disciplined long-term holders in the asset's history: people who held for a decade because a trustee made them.
The Bureau's finding: SETTLING — the rare case where some of the money came back, slowly, to people who had already finished grieving it. The Bureau notes that “not your keys, not your coins” was coined as a warning, and this file is the reason it never needed a second example.