For those new to the cryptocurrency scene, you may be lucky enough to never have heard of Mt. Gox.
Mt.Gox was a bitcoin exchange that at one point up to 70% of Bitcoin trades were going through.
It began in 2010, and ended horribly in 2014 when they announced that approximately 850,000 bitcoins belonging to customers and the company were missing and likely stolen, an amount valued at more than $450 million at the time.
Mark Karpeles, although not the sites founder, bought the site in 2011 and took over as CEO. While his level of personal fault has been debated, he was the man in charge when in June of the same year when in response to a security breach Mt. Gox moved bitcoins from "cold storage" and it was all downhill from there.
Then, beginning in Nov 2013 customers were experiencing delays of weeks to months in withdrawing cash from their accounts, and by Feb 2014, Mt. Gox halted all bitcoin withdrawals, and by the end of the month the fiasco was blamed for a 36% loss in Bitcoin's value.
Fast forward to today - Mark Karpeles is back and considering starting an ICO to bring Mt.Gox back.
In a post updating people on their bankrupcy, he laid out the option to:
Launch an ICO to raise money to hypothetically revive MtGox. This sounds more challenging, both legally and because there is no guarantee of raising enough to revive MtGox. In case there is not enough raised it could still be locked to be distributed to creditors, which would be better than nothing.
The upside, the revival of Mt.Gox would mean paying some of their debts, however - the price of Bitcoin has risen dramtically since then, so people would be recieving a fraction of it's current value back.
The downside... well, Mt.Gox would be back.
Mark knows where he stands in the community, saying:
At this point there is little hope for anything to be actually accomplished, and I have been pondering how to proceed should I want to solve this matter myself - which sounds better than being the object of hate of thousands of people for the rest of my days (it seems I already am anyway, yet sometimes some people send me nice messages, that keeps me going).
Do I expect anything to actually happen? Unlikely.
The price tag on a Mt.Gox revival is placed at $245 Million, and it's hard to imagine an investor seeing a bright future in a Mt.Gox comeback.
Author: Ross Davis
San Francisco News Desk
