by Naked Security writer
Remember Mt. Gox?
Originally, it was a card-trading site called MTGOX, short for Magic The Gathering Online Exchange (there was no sense of “Mountain” in the name at all), but the domain changed hands and purpose in the early days of cryptocurrency.
Operated out of Japan by French expatriate Mark Karpelès, Mt. Gox rapidly became the biggest online Bitcoin exchange, but imploded in 2014 when the company was forced to admit that it had lost Bitcoins worth more than $0.5 billion at the time (they’d be worth more than 25 times as much today).
As we wrote back then:
In 2014, the Big Daddy of Bitcoin exchanges, Japan-based Mt. Gox, made a “So sorry, they seem to have vanished” announcement about a whopping 650,000 Bitcoins, worth approximately $800 each at the time.
The mystery of the missing BTCs was at first blamed on a cryptographic flaw in the Bitcoin protocol that Mt. Gox’s coders hadn’t defended against properly – something they really ought to have done, considering that they were sitting on half-a-billion dollars worth of other people’s assets.
But that story didn’t wash with everyone, not least those who thought that any abuse of the flaw concerned (it’s euphemistically known as transaction malleability if you would like to look it up) ought to have been visible, albeit too late, in the transaction record.
Some people suspected Mt. Gox insiders of simply taking the missing Bitcoins (or some of them, anyway) for themselves.
Ironically, the v ..
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