People are greedy. Isn't that also why we manage our own retirement funds? Hoping to have more than the average Joe in the end?Reading that thread is so /facepalm it's hard to believe these people are really this stupid.
A U.S. federal judge on Tuesday temporarily froze the U.S. assets of Mt. Gox chief Mark Karpeles and allowed alleged victims of the shuttered bitcoin exchange to demand evidence of what they claim is a massive fraud.
The market for the digital currency was rocked last month when Mt. Gox, once the world's largest bitcoin exchange, ceased operations, and soon after filed for bankruptcy. Mt. Gox said it may have lost 750,000 bitcoins, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, in a hacking attack.
The freeze on Karpeles' assets, issued by Judge Gary Feinerman in Chicago, also applies to Mt. Gox's U.S. affiliate and the Japanese parent company, Tibanne, according to Christopher Dore, an Edelson attorney who represents U.S. customers of the bitcoin exchange.
The judge's order did not apply to the Tokyo-based Mt. Gox KK, which was shielded from litigation after it filed for bankruptcy protection in Japan and the United States.
Two months before Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy it was sued by a customer seeking the return of funds in a case that highlights some of the red flags raised in the run-up to the collapse of what was once the world's biggest bitcoin exchange.
New York resident Marko Simovic filed a civil action at the Tokyo District Court on December 24, seeking to recover $105,000 he had on deposit at Mt. Gox and about $14,000 in interest, court filings show.
Simovic, who described himself as a software developer who previously managed the bitcoin operations for a hedge fund, said Mt. Gox dodged repeated requests to withdraw funds from his account, which as of July 1 was credited with $935,000 in cash. Simovic could not be reached for comment.
Mt. Gox refuted Simovic's claims in a brief filed by law firm Baker & McKenzie. It said Simovic didn't comply with online procedures, and cited withdrawal limits that would have required two months for him to draw down his account. That rebuttal was submitted to the court three weeks before Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy protection on February 28, saying it had lost bitcoins and cash worth more than half a billion dollars to hackers.
The lawsuit was cited in a U.S. bankruptcy filing earlier this week, which is related to the company's Tokyo bankruptcy proceedings.
If I'm reading this right, guy had at one point close to a mil on gox -- guessing he got nervous and started swapping it for coins when US withdrawals went bad.
What, you've never lost a wallet before?!Mt.Gox finds 200,000 bitcoins in old wallet - Mar. 21, 2014
How incompetent of a company do you have to be to lose 200,000 bitcoins in an old wallet?
Yeah it's annoying but keeping the discovery of new coins limited to very specific methods prevents exploitation. If research labs could offload processing to the mining community there'd be a chance for a lab to subvert the process by having mining that can be done very efficiently if someone had a priori knowledge of an algorithm well suited to that task.I still dont understand why all this processing power is wasted? should this not be used for something good AND provide coinage for the miners at the same time? Harness that power for the genome project, or some cancer research, anything?