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Twice burned -- how Mt. Gox's bitcoin customers could lose again

Section: Daily Dispatches

By Alexandra Harney and Steve Stecklow
Reuters
Thursday, November 16, 2017

TOKYO -- When Mt. Gox, the world's largest bitcoin trading exchange, collapsed in early 2014, more than 24,000 customers around the world lost access to hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of cryptocurrency and cash.

More than three years later, with the price of bitcoin skyrocketing to more than $7,000, not a single customer has recouped a single cent, crypto or otherwise. It's not clear when they will. The failed exchange has become stuck in a morass of litigation -- a Russian doll of bankruptcies in Japan and New Zealand, four in all, plus lawsuits in the United States and competing claims from creditors.

And although the Mt. Gox bankruptcy trustee recovered digital currency now worth more than $1.6 billion, under Japanese law the exchange's customers likely will recover only a fraction of that.

Kim Nilsson, a Swedish software developer who had more than a dozen bitcoins at Mt. Gox, isn't optimistic of a payout soon. "It's a legal twilight zone," he says. "I wouldn't be surprised if it took several years more." ...

In all, more than 980,000 bitcoins have been stolen from exchanges since 2011 -- two-thirds of those from Mt. Gox. Today all the stolen coins would be worth more than $6 billion, Reuters has calculated. ...

... For the remainder of the report:

http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/bitcoin-gox/



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