A cold in the morning of February in 2014, Kolin Burges was outside the Mt. Gox office of Tokyo, grabbing a handwritten cardboard sign and demanding responses from the CEO of the Bitcoin Exchange, Mark Karpeles, about his missing tokens.
Eleven years later, the iconic, emblematic sign of the first important financial scandal of Crypto, is auctioned to scare. City with a reserve price of 4.5 BTC ($ 383,000). The sale begins later on Friday and ends on April 3.
“At that time, it didn’t even happen to my mind, it could become valuable,” Burges said in an interview with Coindesk in Hong Kong. “I thought I would write a book one day, but the sign itself never seemed important. It is remarkable how things have evolved.”
Burges had flown from London to Tokyo after Mount Gox, then the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange, mysteriously frozen.
“I woke up a morning and I knew I had to go to Tokyo,” Burges recalled. “I really didn’t have a detailed plan. I just knew I had to be there.
“When the withdrawal did not arrive, I began to feel this growing feeling of fear. At first, it was not 100% safe, but as time passed, it was increasingly clear that something was very bad.”
His improvised protest quickly caught the attention of international media, even attracting the conventional financial press warning such as the Wall Street Journal.
Burges recalled those initial days in Tokyo as dream and almost from another world.
“At the time I confronted Karpeles,” he recalled. “I demanded answers, but he simply ruled me, blaming the technical problems. He felt surreal, standing there in the snow, knowing that something important was developing.”
While Burges protested outside the offices of Mount Gox, attempts to mitigate public consequences became increasingly evident.
“Mount Gox continued to hang hope, but everyone could see the situation in the spiral out of control,” Burges said. “They even invited us to protest in private. Anything to get us out of the public. It was ridiculous and desperate.”
Burges remembers how the drinks, someone from Mount Gox, whom he refused to name, pressed him privately to cut him.
“At one time, the representatives of Mount Gox found me in secret, warning that the continuous protests would cause the exchange to collapse and all would lose their bitcoins,” he said. “That conversation made it clear that they knew more than they admitted, and the situation was much worse than he publicly recognized.”
Then, Burges remembers, a representative tried to pay their drinks with an Mt. Gox credit card, and was rejected.
“It was a sinister sign that their banking relationships were falling apart,” Burges said.
Mount Gox declared bankruptcy in February 2014, days after Burges began its protest.
Seven years later, Karpeles was found innocent of embezzlement in a Tokyo court, while receiving a sentence suspended by manipulating data.
Last September, Karpeles established a new cryptography exchange, Ellipx. He also established a cryptographic grades company called UNGOX in 2022.
In an interview with Coendesk outside the Blockchain Week in Korea in August 2024, Karple said that if he had modern blockchain analytical tools in 2014, and third -party custodians, Mount Gox “would not have happened.”
