Mt. Gox Lost More than Just Bitcoins

Following the bankruptcy of Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox on Friday, the company has released a full statement on the matter on the homepage of its website, including the loss of $27 million.

Following the bankruptcy of Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox on Friday, the company has released a full statement on the matter on the homepage of its website.

Under the purview of the Tokyo District Court on Friday, the company began “procedure of civil rehabilitation.” This includes orders preventing the company from paying its debts, transferring assets, or performing other financial maneuvers.

It also gives specifics numbers on how the liabilities of the company dwarf their current assets. Gox currently has assets totaling 3,841,866,163 yen, and liabilities estimated around 6,501,119,371 yen (roughly $38 million and $64 million, respectively). Those estimates only account for fiat currency, and clearly don’t take into account the loss of the bitcoins themselves, which is estimate to reach as high as $500 million.

It appears that Gox’s losses extended further than just the hundred of thousands of bitcoins. The notice also states:

[On Feb. 24], we found out large discrepancies between the amount of cash held in financial institutions and the amount deposited from our users. The amounts are still under investigation and may vary but they approximate JPY 2.8 billion.

We are investigating the causes of these problems. Since there are probably a variety of causes including hacking by third parties, we need to investigate a huge amount of transaction reports in order to establish the truth. As of this date, we cannot confirm the exact amount of missing deposit funds and the total amount of bitcoins which disappeared.

Basically, in addition to 850,000 bitcoins, hackers might have also stolen 2.8 billion yen, the official Japanese currency (roughly $27.6 million).

The company has set up a call center for users wishing to inquire about the site’s myriad number of issues. On Sunday, an anonymous paste purportedly revealed the site’s internal code and a rumored 20 gigabytes of data from the site.

It’ll be a while before all of this gets sorted out (or if it even gets sorted out). Conspiracies theories are already flying though, including this gem about Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles blinking the word “gag” in morse code at his Friday press conference.