MagicalTux

There are many things going around and I’ve read a lot of coverage based on false rumors and inexact information.

There is a lot of information out there about everything that happened in 2014 and before, so I’ll focus on things that seem most obvious and came up with journalists/others.

I’ll start focusing on the book “Digital Gold” recently released by NY Times writer Nathaniel Popper. While I haven’t had the chance to read it yet, Vice published an excerpt, so I’m going to highlight and correct some of the most obvious issues.

So…

“Its assets have been acquired by Kraken, a San Francisco-based competitor, which is now refunding Mt. Gox customers.”

Actually, Kraken is only helping with the bankruptcy, and while they acquired the hardware owned by MtGox (see document released by trustee on Nov 26th 2014, page 10 of pdf or 2 of English text, I.3), they are not “refunding” MtGox customers.

“Mark Karpeles, the CEO of the Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, was spending many of his days in early 2014 turning the ground floor of his Tokyo office into the Bitcoin Café, a real-world showcase for Bitcoin.”

I don’t know why people are trying to portray me as some kind of person who didn’t care about ongoing issues at that time and escaped reality through miscellaneous tasks. Oh wait, actually some people are trying to portray me as the bad guy, because that fits better their understanding of things. Of course, let’s just take the guy we know and make him the bad guy so we don’t have to search for the culprit.

Well, anyway, the point is most of my weeks managing MtGox consisted in meetings, as you can see for example from that small copy of my schedule:

This is a typical week for the MtGox CEO.

That’s still 29 meetings in one week. Anyway, “spending many of his days” would probably mean I’d have some time to spare for that Bitcoin Café project. There indeed were meetings about the Café (you can see a whole 2 hours in that week), but most of all, meetings were about important and sometimes urgent issues requiring my direct attention (bank, lawyers, accounting, data-center, etc).

Not only this schedule can be confirmed by then-employees (thanks to Google Apps, any employee has read access to the schedule of any other employee) but it can also be confirmed by the people I actually met.

The people who have been saying things such as I’ve been “spending many of [my] days in early 2014 turning the ground floor of [the] Tokyo office into the Bitcoin Café” are most likely people who don’t know what has been actually happening. This is even more obvious in the following:

“When Mark wasn’t working on the café, he was in his office, behind a locked door on the eighth floor, far from the second- and fourth-floor offices where most of his staff was located.”

One more proof whoever has been talking about MtGox has no idea how the company was. There is no fourth floor, and there has never been a fourth floor in the company. I’m pretty sure any actual employee of the company would know that much.

Also, it was not uncommon for employees to come visit me (sometimes by setting up a meeting, sometimes unannounced) to discuss various things. The main reason I setup a separate office for myself was to avoid bothering everyone with meetings. You’ll note that my office/meeting room was right next to the employees’ break room, which allowed basically anyone to visit that floor.

“What Mark didn’t mention was that all the other major Bitcoin companies had known about the issue for years and had designed around it.”

Oh really? That one is rather big, since the information can be verified publicly on Internet. Like there, or there. 

It looks like there’s a lot of misinformation out there. A lot is very obvious, but there can be parts which are more challenging to correct (for example because doing so could affect the bankruptcy procedure or ongoing investigations). I can only hope people understand not everything can be taken at face value, and while it’s probably easier to just buy in the popular opinion and not think by yourself, this can lead to various misconceptions - and a lot of misunderstandings.

I will continue to post about the various lies and errors found in the publicly available information until we reach the truth.

I don’t expect many people to read this (I know some will, but being aware that this goes against what a lot of people want to believe, this might be quite unpopular and an opportunity for various trolls) but I’ll post as much as I can about this because it is my belief that someone, somewhere, wants to hear the truth and be able to discern lies in the ample news coverage this unfortunate event had.

I am also writing this for MtGox’s creditors, who I believe have the right to know how things happened and see more than the distorted view the media has been reflecting.

I couldn’t apologize enough for what happened despite being in charge, and while it might be but a small contribution, I will continue fighting.