Top Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox goes offline
TOKYO — Mt. Gox, once the world’s biggest Bitcoin exchange, seemed to have essentially disappeared on Tuesday, with its website down, its founder unaccounted for, a Tokyo office empty, and a handful of protesters saying they had lost money investing in the virtual currency.
The digital marketplace operator, which began as a venue for trading cards, had surged to the top of the Bitcoin world, but critics — from rival exchanges to burned investors — said Mt. Gox had long been lax over its security. It was not clear what has become of the exchange, which this month halted withdrawals indefinitely after detecting “unusual activity.”
A global Bitcoin organization referred to the exchange’s “exit,” while angry investors questioned whether it was still solvent.
A document circulating on the internet, and purporting to be a crisis plan for the exchange, said more than 744,000 Bitcoins were “missing due to malleability-related theft”, and noted Mt. Gox had $174 million in liabilities against $32.75 million in assets. It was not possible to verify the document or the exchange’s financial situation.
Tokyo investors in the frontier electronic currency, who have endured a volatile ride in the value of the unregulated cyber-tender, said the problem was with Mt. Gox, not with the revolutionary Bitcoin itself.
Mt. Gox officials did not answer the telephone or respond to email requests for information. The concierge at the home of the chief executive, Mark Karpeles — an upscale apartment in the Shibuya district — said he was not answering his intercom. His mailbox was so stuffed with mail that the flap would not close.
The Mt. Gox homepage was not loading, although no error message appeared. Its source code contained a line saying, “put announce for mtgox acq here.”
“I’m very angry,” said Kolin Burges, a self-styled “crypto-currency trader” and former software engineer who came from London for answers after Mt. Gox failed