Mt. Gox finds 200,000 bitcoins in old wallet

Mt. Gox says that it has found around 200,000 bitcoins - worth in the region of $116 million - in an old digital wallet.

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Mt. Gox finds 200,000 bitcoins in old wallet

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This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community.

The Japan-based exchange filed for bankruptcy protection last month after claiming to have lost 850,000 bitcoins, around seven per cent of all the coins in circulation.

However, in a notice on the Mt. Gox Web site, CEO Mark Karpeles now says that the firm has found an old-format wallet dating back to before June 2011 which contains 200,000 coins.

The funds have been moved to offline storage and lawyers for the exchange operator have notified the court about the find, which take the number of missing bitcoins down to 650,000.

Mt. Gox says that it lost the bitcoins - 750,000 of which belonged to customers - after a software bug let hackers plunder accounts. This week an update to the 'Bitcoin Core' software has been released which aims to fix the "transaction malleability" issue.

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Comments: (3)

A Finextra member 

Have they looked under the other desks too?.. :)

A Finextra member 

This kind of apparent incompetence does rather underline the case for some sort of effective regulation of virtual currency exchanges before they become a significant proportion of the money supply...

Ketharaman Swaminathan

Ketharaman Swaminathan Founder and CEO at GTM360 Marketing Solutions

Yet another reason why people shouldn't rush to ditch their "old wallets" while deliberating a move to mobile wallets!

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