Mt. Gox: the trunk looks full... until the day the withdrawals stop

In February 2014, customers of Mt. Gox can no longer withdraw their bitcoins normally. The platform, which has occupied a major place in their exchanges, is collapsing. The figures announced during the crisis are huge, but the theft does not correspond to a single operation executed the day before the bankruptcy.

The U.S. judicial investigation published in 2023 describes illegitimate access to servers as early as 2011. The defendants reportedly used this access and private keys to gradually bring out about 647,000 bitcoins. The amount corresponds to the allegations in this case, not a conversion at the current rate.

The shift is central: an exchange system can continue to show balances while the assets actually available no longer correspond to all its obligations. Stopping withdrawals makes this difference impossible for customers to ignore.

Bankruptcy opens a long process of research, accounting and distribution. Assets are found; this does not instantly restore all balances, nor all personal situations. The value of bitcoin changes greatly during the wait, which makes any comparison between a sum lost at the time and a current valuation misleading.

The US Department of Justice names Alexey Bilyuchenko and Aleksandr Verner in the charges made public in 2023. This act sets forth a thesis of the accusation; it must not be transformed into a definitive judgment by the narrative.

Mt. Gox has become a historical case of custody and accounting of cryptoassets. His teaching goes beyond the word piracy: what the customer sees in his account must be able to be brought closer to what the custodian actually controls.