On a cold February morning in 2014, Kolin Burges stood outside Mt. Gox’s Tokyo office and grabbed a handwritten cardboard sign and required answers from Bitcoin Exchange’s CEO, Mark Karpeles, about his missing tokens.
Eleven years later, the iconic sign that is symbolic of Crypto’s first major economic scandal, auctioned at Scare.city with a reserve price of 4.5 BTC ($ 383,000). The sale starts later Friday and ends April 3.
“At that time, it didn’t even cross my mind that it could be valuable,” Burges said in an interview with Coindesk in Hong Kong. “I thought maybe I would write a book one day, 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 exchange, froze withdrawals.
“I woke up one morning and knew I was going to Tokyo,” Burges remembered. “I didn’t really have a detailed plan. I just knew I was going to be there.
“When the withdrawal did not arrive, I began to feel this growing feeling of fear. At first I was not 100% safe, but as time went on, it became increasingly clear that there was much wrong.”
His improvised protest quickly gained international media attention and even attracted the message of mainstream financial press as The Wall Street Journal.
Burges remembered the initial days in Tokyo as dreamlike and almost another world.
“The moment I confronted carpeles, was intense,” he remembered. “I demanded answers, but he just brushed me off and accused technical problems. It felt surreal, standing there in the snow, knowing that something bigger unfolded.”
When Burges protested outside Mt. Gox’s offices, the exchange’s attempt to mitigate the public fallout became more and more clear.
“Mt. Gox continued to dangle hope, but everyone could see the situation spiraled out of control,” Burges said. “They even invited us in to protest privately. Something to remove us from public sight. It was ridiculous and desperate.”
Burges are reminiscent of how over drinks, someone from Mt. Gox, whom he refused to name, pressed him privately to cut it out.
“At one point, Mt. Gox representatives met me in secret, warning that continued protests would cause the exchange to collapse and everyone would lose their Bitcoins,” he said. “This conversation made it clear that they knew more than they admitted, and the situation was far worse than publicly recognized.”
Then Burges remembers, a representative tried to pay for their drinks with an Mt. Gox credit card – and it was rejected.
“It was an ominous sign that their banking conditions were detached,” Burges said.
Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy in February 2014, days after Burges started his protest.
Seven years later, Karpeles was found innocent by sub -strikes in a Tokyo court while receiving a suspended verdict to manipulate data.
Last September, Karpeles created a new crypto exchange, Ellipx. He also established a crypto rating 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 analytic tools in 2014, and third-party managers, Mt. Gox “not happened.”
