Report: Mt. Gox Bitcoin Loss Was An Inside Job

It’s almost a year since the Bitcoin locker Mt. Gox went offline and took its digital currency with it. Now, a report in Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper claims that 99 per cent of the bitcoins that went missing from Mt. Gox falls were a result of “internal system manipulation.”



The newspaper reports that only 7,000 of the 650,000 bitcoins that went missing can be attributed to hacking attacks. The rest, the article claims, must have been lost through some other, internal means. The article doesn’t suggest that it’s the work of CEO Mark Karpeles.

At the time, Mt. Gox blamed the disappearance of its bitcoins on a ‘transaction malleability’ flaw in bitcoin’s underlying code. That vulnerability was later fixed, but not before Mt. Gox was forced to give up and file for liquidation.

Rumours about an inside job obviously circulated at the time, but they were denied by Bitcoin developers and Mt. Gox alike. The fact that the rumour has resurfaced suggests that there may still be a grain of truth within it. [Yomiuri Shimbun via Coin Desk]