One chilly February morning in 2014, Kolin Burges stood outdoors Mt. Gox’s Tokyo workplace, clutching a handwritten cardboard signal and demanding solutions from the bitcoin alternate’s CEO, Mark Karpeles, about his lacking tokens.
Eleven years later, the long-lasting signal, emblematic of crypto’s first main monetary scandal, is being auctioned on Scare.Metropolis with a reserve worth of 4.5 BTC ($383,000). The sale begins later Friday and ends April 3.
“At the time, it didn’t even cross my mind it could become valuable,” Burges stated in an interview with CoinDesk in Hong Kong. “I thought maybe I’d write a book someday, but the sign itself never seemed important. It’s remarkable how things have evolved.”
Burges had flown from London to Tokyo after Mt. Gox, then the world’s largest bitcoin alternate, mysteriously froze withdrawals.
“I woke up one morning and knew I had to go to Tokyo,” Burges recalled. “I didn’t really have a detailed plan. I just knew I had to be there.
“When the withdrawal did not arrive, I began feeling this rising sense of dread. At first, I wasn’t 100% certain, however as time went on, it grew to become more and more clear one thing was very fallacious.”
His impromptu protest quickly gained international media attention, even attracting the notice of mainstream financial press like the Wall Street Journal.
Burges recalled those initial days in Tokyo as dreamlike and almost otherworldly.
“The second I confronted Karpeles was intense,” he remembered. “I demanded solutions, however he simply brushed me off, blaming technical points. It felt surreal, standing there within the snow, understanding one thing main was unfolding.”
As Burges protested outside Mt. Gox’s offices, the exchange’s attempts to mitigate the public fallout became increasingly evident.
“Mt. Gox saved dangling hope, however everybody might see the scenario spiraling uncontrolled,” Burges said. “They even invited us inside to protest privately. Something to take away us from public view. It was ridiculous and determined.”
Burges recalls how over drinks, someone from Mt. Gox, whom he declined to name, privately pressured him to cut it out.
“At one level, Mt. Gox representatives met me secretly, warning that continued protests would trigger the alternate to break down and everybody would lose their bitcoins,” he said. “That dialog made it clear they knew greater than they admitted, and the scenario was far worse than publicly acknowledged.”
Then, Burges recollects, one representative tried paying for their drinks with a Mt. Gox credit card — and it was declined.
“It was an ominous signal their banking relationships have been unraveling,” Burges said.
Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy in February 2014, days after Burges started his protest.
Seven years later, Karpeles was found innocent of embezzlement in a Tokyo court, while receiving a suspended sentence for manipulating data.
Last September, Karpeles set up a new crypto exchange, EllipX. He also established a crypto ratings company called Ungox in 2022.
In an interview with CoinDesk on the sidelines of Korea Blockchain Week in August 2024, Karples said that if he had modern blockchain analytical tools in 2014, and third-party custodians, Mt. Gox “would not have occurred.”
