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The seemingly miraculous discovery of about $116 million in missing Bitcoin, or 200,000 coins, late Thursday underscored the rickety early infrastructure that the digital currency is still trying to overcome.

In a posting on its website in both Japanese and English, the now-defunct Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox announced that it had found the coins in an “old-format wallets,” the virtual currency equivalent of finding money in another pair of pants.

In its statement from its chief executive, Mark Karpeles, the company said that after it filed for bankruptcy, it began researching the wallets that were used before June 2011. That, the company said, is when it discovered the coins, which represent about 24 percent of the coins that were missing when the site failed.

Last month, Mt. Gox said it had lost 750,000 of its Bitcoin customers’ holdings and more than 100,000 of its own coins — essentially its entire stock of Bitcoin, worth more than $450 million. The found coins are worth about $116 million based on today’s rate of $578, according to the online Bitcoin index CoinDesk.

“I think that it’s yet another illustration of how incompetently managed that hobbyist operation was,” said Gil Luria, a managing director at Wedbush Securities who has written about Bitcoin. “That you can lose that much Bitcoin and then find it tells you that we’re not talking about robust levels of security and control.”

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Mr. Luria said it was likely that Mt. Gox initially overestimated the amount of Bitcoin it had lost.

Many Bitcoin supporters have said that the collapse of Mt. Gox is part of the shakeout of the early, less sophisticated Bitcoin companies that have lost ground to more well-oiled businesses.

“Where we are now is in this period of quiet transition before we see the emergence of actual exchanges,” Mr. Luria said. “The hobbyist operations are behind us and the robust, enterprise-grade operations are ahead of us.”

Mt. Gox, which originally started as a trading place for the card game Magic: The Gathering, was one of the first exchanges to pop up after Bitcoin mysteriously appeared online in 2009, the brainchild of an anonymous programmer or group of programmers.

Mt. Gox’s operations, however, were never totally transparent, and Mr. Karpeles was known as a private man who rarely showed up at public gatherings, or at meetings of the board of the Bitcoin Foundation on which he served until his resignation last month.

At its peak, Mt. Gox handled about 80 percent of all Bitcoin transactions, but began losing significant ground to more sophisticated foreign exchanges like BTC-e, based in Bulgaria, and Bitstamp, in Slovenia, last year.

While those companies may be helping to fuel a wider use of virtual currency, they still fall outside the grasp of American regulators. Bitcoin has no federal regulator and is not backed by a central bank. That has appealed to a core group of its more libertarian followers, but offers few options when investments turn sour, as in the case with Mt. Gox.

While the Tokyo-based exchange said that it had lost its 850,000 coins, some skeptics said they thought that the coins had actually been stolen.

Thieves can pilfer Bitcoin by gaining access through a computer network or taking physical material on which crucial information is stored. Coins can be stored online or offline, otherwise known as “hot” and “cold” wallets.

A “cold” wallet can be nothing more than writing down a digital key on a scrap of paper to access one’s Bitcoin, or storing the data on a thumb drive. Access to a “hot” wallet is through a computer network.

A veritable army of Internet sleuths has been trying to track down missing Bitcoin since Mt. Gox went offline. Some users have joined a class-action lawsuit in Chicago against the exchange that is trying to keep Mr. Karpeles and his company from moving any money outside the United States.

They also want a full accounting of any assets Mt. Gox has left.

“We believe that he’s got a bunch of them, and we believe that he’s got a bunch more,” Jay Edelson, the plaintiffs’ attorney, said in a phone interview on Friday.

Mr. Edelson said that he and others believed they had traced about 200,000 coins to a pool operated by Mr. Karpeles.

“Our belief is that the reason that they supposedly found this was because they understood that we and others had already found this amount and knew that they were holding it,” Mr. Edelson said. “So the idea that they found it and were going to come public is exactly the opposite of what we believe happened.”