One cold February morning in 2014, Kolin Burges stood outside Mt. Gox’s Tokyo office, clutching a handwritten cardboard sign and demanding answers from the bitcoin exchange’s CEO, Mark Karpeles, about his missing tokens.
Eleven years later, the iconic sign, emblematic of crypto’s first major financial scandal, is being auctioned on Scare.City with a reserve price of 4.5 BTC ($383,000). The sale starts later Friday and ends April 3.
“At the time, it didn’t even cross my mind it could become valuable,” Burges said in an interview with CoinDesk in Hong Kong. “I thought maybe I’d write a book someday, 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, mysteriously froze withdrawals.
“I woke up one morning and knew I had to go to Tokyo,” Burges recalled. “I didn’t really have a detailed plan. I just knew I had to be there.
“When the withdrawal didn’t arrive, I started feeling this growing sense of dread. At first, I wasn’t 100% sure, but as time went on, it became increasingly clear something was very wrong.”
His impromptu protest quickly gained international media attention, even attracting the notice of mainstream financial press like the Wall Street Journal.
Burges recalled those initial days in Tokyo as dreamlike and almost otherworldly.
“The moment I confronted Karpeles was intense,” he remembered. “I demanded answers, but he just brushed me off, blaming technical issues. It felt surreal, standing there in the snow, knowing something major was unfolding.”
As Burges protested outside Mt. Gox’s offices, the exchange’s attempts to mitigate the public fallout became increasingly evident.
“Mt. Gox kept dangling hope, but everyone could see the situation spiraling out of control,” Burges said. “They even invited us inside to protest privately. Anything to remove us from public view. It was ridiculous and desperate.”
Burges recalls how over drinks, someone from Mt. Gox, whom he declined to name, privately pressured him to cut it out.
“At one point, Mt. Gox representatives met me secretly, warning that continued protests would cause the exchange to collapse and everyone would lose their bitcoins,” he said. “That conversation made it clear they knew more than they admitted, and the situation was far worse than publicly acknowledged.”
Then, Burges recollects, one representative tried paying for their drinks with a Mt. Gox credit card — and it was declined.
“It was an ominous sign their banking relationships were unraveling,” Burges said.
Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy in February 2014, days after Burges started his protest.
Seven years later, Karpeles was found innocent of embezzlement in a Tokyo court, while receiving a suspended sentence for manipulating data.
Last September, Karpeles set up a new crypto exchange, EllipX. He also established a crypto ratings 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 analytical tools in 2014, and third-party custodians, Mt. Gox “wouldn’t have happened.”
