It appears that Mt Gox has discovered a wallet containing 200,000 Bitcoins they had hidden away, unnoticed, in cold storage.
The official statement from Mt Gox claimed-
“Following the application for commencement of a civil rehabilitation proceeding, these wallets were rescanned and their balance researched. On March 7, 2014, MtGox Co., Ltd. confirmed that an old-format wallet which was used prior to June 2011 held a balance of approximately 200,000 BTC”- Mt Gox website.
Mt Gox filed for bankruptcy after an apparent hack back in February caused their exchange to cease trading. Another exchange, Flexcoin, was hacked shortly afterwards.
The Bitcoins, worth around $116million USD (or £70million GBP) reduces their apparent losses from 850,000 to 650,000. Out of the initial figure of 850,000 Bitcoins stolen, 750,000 were being stored for customers and 100,000 belonged to Mt Gox themselves. The theft accounted for about 7% of the entire supply of Bitcoin.The recovered coins allegedly went unnoticed because they had been stored in an old-format wallet, which had become obsolete, and had since been out of use. Since Mt Gox’s application for civil rehabilitation- a legal procedure in Japan that may allow Mt. Gox to rebuild and pay back some of its creditors- the exchange has won brief bankruptcy protection as the case goes through the Japanese judiciary system. The firm’s US subsidiary has applied for bankruptcy, and two class action lawsuits have been placed by Mt Gox users, hoping to be compensated for their losses.
The failure of Mt Gox has prompted Cryptocurrency detractors to denounce Bitcoin exchanges as fundamentally unsafe.
There is an air of suspicion surrounding the recent demise of Mt Gox, and with good cause. Owing to the fact that every Bitcoin transaction is public, it is entirely possible for anybody to check the blockchain (the record of all Bitcoin transactions), and verify Mt Gox’s claim. The official statement from Mt Gox is that the obsolete wallet was noticed on the 7th of March, when it became active after a dormant period, and transferred the sum of 199,999.99 Bitcoins, in two separate transactions. This contradicts the blockchain, which shows that the transactions were quite clearly spread across five wallets...
Read more at:
http://www.coinchilli.com/mtgox-finds-missing-bitcoins/J.C Axe
