Mt. Gox was the largest Bitcoin exchange in the world in 2014. The brains behind Mt. Gox was Mark Karpeles who has kept a rather low profile in recent years.
Karpeles recently posted on Reddit and answered a few questions on the online forum pertaining to Bitcoin.
Karpeles was not very positive on the future of bitcoin and that does not come entirely as a surprise given the fact that he lost nearly $6 billion.
His answers were not very well received and caused a lot of backlash on social media.
Karpeles who has a tarnished reputation in the cryptocurrency industry briefly described how Mt. Gox collapsed and some of his struggles after that which included a year in jail and bankruptcy. He said that he hopes to be able to start making payments to reimburse those who have lost funds in the Mt.Gox hack.
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Mt. Gox was hacked in 2014 and the exchange lost around 650,000 bitcoins to hackers. This led to its eventual collapse, with many alleging that the hack was not a hack at all but an actual conspiracy to steal all those bitcoins. Karpeles who was the CEO at that time filed for bankruptcy and ended up in jail.
Since the hack, the Mt. Gox incident has become the incident that people use as an example when it comes to what can go wrong with cryptocurrency. Mt.Gox and Karpeles still face the heat as the trustees of the Mt. Gox estate have blamed them for the extreme price drops in bitcoin value. These allegations are based on the fact that Mt.Gox dumped a lot of tokens into the market to earn money to pay off the exchange's creditors.
Bitcoin Could Struggle To Stay Relevant
Karpeles is quite clear in his statement that he no longer owns any cryptocurrency, even though he once became rich dealing in it. In his opinion, Ether is still too new and untested, while he thinks that Bitcoin will have trouble evolving in the marketplace and staying relevant.
Karpeles also stated on Reddit that he wants to ensure that all 24,000 people who lost Bitcoin in the hack are repaid. He intends to do this to ensure everyone gets some closure. Karpeles is still in Japan undergoing trial and knows that he could face many years in prison if he is convicted. He remains hopeful and says that when it is all over, he just plans to go back to being an engineer.
