The Bitcoin and its industries is currently growing like ever before. We see more and more gambling sites opening up their doors to accepting the cryptocurrency, we see more and more mainstream adaption and we see more vendors, charities and online businesses accepting it.
But we don’t have to go more than a little over a year back in time to find the by far biggest bump in the road for the Bitcoin, when the biggest Bitcoin exchange site at the time, Mt. Gox, went bankrupt after months of problems.
Mt. Gox closed its doors officially in February of 2014, but at the time of the closure the customers had not been able to withdraw their funds or Bitcoins for months. Mark Karpeles, the owner of Mt. Gox, denied any issues almost until the end, but there was no way around a bankruptcy for Mt. Gox.
A total of 850,000 Bitcoins were missing for the company, totaling at a value at the time of almost $64 million. The case is the biggest to date in the Bitcoin industry and it should never be replaced, with new security measures in place, better control as well as regulations from many countries.
This doesn’t help the customers who lost their funds very much however. Many lost life-changing money when Mt. Gox closed down and people were so frustrated that they actually travelled to Mt. Gox’s headquarters in Tokyo, Japan, to try and figure out exactly what had happened.
Mt. Gox has since its closure been subject to several investigations and probes, to try and find out where the Bitcoins went exactly. It was first believed that Mt. Gox was hacked during 2013, where most of the Bitcoins were stolen from the exchange site, but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore.
CoinDesk.com reported earlier this week that the Bitcoins had been going out of the system from 2011 until May 2013, where the company had almost no Bitcoins left and were effectively bankrupt at that point. The Bitcoins had been withdrawn from the company and sold on other exchange sites, leaving the company to operate at fractional reserve basis.
There is some good news for those who lost their Bitcoins in the Mt. Gox failure, as the site has now opened up for customers to make a claim against the company. To do so is quite simply, as you simply need to visit claims.mtgox.com and fill in your account details by May 29th this year.
Once done you simply submit the claim on the website and the company will then make a decision on what will happen on September 9th this year. While there’s almost no chance that the customers will see all of their Bitcoins back, it is positive that something is done in the case, unlike other Bitcoin exchange sites who closed shop without letting customers filing claims.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter how large a portion of the Bitcoins that the customers will receive back, they will still lose money. The Bitcoin was valued much higher when Mt. Gox went bankrupt than it is now, but for those who uses the Bitcoin without thinking of its fiat-money value, it is still a lot better than getting nothing back at all.
So if you were a customer at Mt. Gox, visit claims.mtgox.com and fill in the claim. It doesn’t take long and you have nothing to lose by doing it.
