<story><title>Q&amp;A With Mt. Gox’s Karpelès: What Went Wrong?</title><url>http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2014/06/27/qa-with-mt-goxs-karpeles-what-went-wrong/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sillysaurus3</author><text>Let me remind everyone that Karpeles is an established liar and a convicted computer fraudster, and will obviously say or do anything at this point to clear his own name.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://newslines.org/mt-gox/joins-linux-cyberjoueurs/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;newslines.org&amp;#x2F;mt-gox&amp;#x2F;joins-linux-cyberjoueurs&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://newslines.org/mt-gox/convicted-of-computer-fraud/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;newslines.org&amp;#x2F;mt-gox&amp;#x2F;convicted-of-computer-fraud&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Again, what ultimately convinced me of Karpeles&amp;#x27; character is that he paid his IRC support staff to lie to users.  The support staff didn&amp;#x27;t realize they were being paid to lie, but they were certainly lies.  They were being paid to tell users, &amp;quot;Yes, all of your coins are safe and secure&amp;quot; while Karpeles was drafting his Mt. Gox crisis report: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scribd.com/doc/209050732/MtGox-Situation-Crisis-Strategy-Draft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.scribd.com&amp;#x2F;doc&amp;#x2F;209050732&amp;#x2F;MtGox-Situation-Crisis-S...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Once Mt. Gox was hacked in the aftermath, a log of their trading activity was leaked.  In that log, there&amp;#x27;s evidence of an Mt. Gox trading bot that had been operating for a long time, buying up bitcoins in order to inflate the price.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://willyreport.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/the-willy-report-proof-of-massive-fraudulent-trading-activity-at-mt-gox-and-how-it-has-affected-the-price-of-bitcoin/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;willyreport.wordpress.com&amp;#x2F;2014&amp;#x2F;05&amp;#x2F;25&amp;#x2F;the-willy-report...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7796748&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=7796748&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;At this point, I don&amp;#x27;t think Mt. Gox or Karpeles deserves any further attention, except as a warning that even the largest Bitcoin exchange can fail, which is why you must store your bitcoins in your own secure wallet, not any third party service.&lt;p&gt;EDIT:  Also, Mt. Gox lost at most 386 bitcoins to malleability:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7482451&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=7482451&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Q&amp;A With Mt. Gox’s Karpelès: What Went Wrong?</title><url>http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2014/06/27/qa-with-mt-goxs-karpeles-what-went-wrong/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rdl</author><text>For me the underlying question is still: was he initially just incredibly incompetent, or always a scam using incompetence as a cover?&lt;p&gt;Even in the case of just pure incompetence, there was a failure of ethics&amp;#x2F;law in how problems were handled, but if it was just incompetence fundamentally, bringing in a good partner early on might have saved it.</text></comment>