CEO of Defunct Mt. Gox Doesn’t Want to Get Rich Taking ‎Creditors' Bitcoins

Mark Karpelès, former CEO of the now-defunct Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, said ‎in an ‘Ask me anything’ Reddit Q&A session that he doesn’t want to profit millions of dollars which will be left after paying out claims of the ‎exchange’s creditors.‎

Despite his responsibility for turning the largest Bitcoin exchange into a bankrupt ‎company, the French-born Karpeles could stand to gain 160,000 Bitcoin and Bitcoin ‎Cash from the remaining assets in the Gox estate. ‎

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Those assets, currently valued at $1.13 billion, will be distributed to shareholders as ‎part of the liquidation. This is because the value of creditors’ claims are calculated in ‎the exchange rate between Bitcoin and Japanese yen in bankruptcy date, April 2014, instead of current rates.‎

‎“I don’t want this. I don’t want this billion dollars. From day one I never ‎expected to receive anything from this bankruptcy. The fact that today this is a ‎possibility is an aberration and I believe it is my responsibility to make sure it ‎doesn’t happen,” said Karpeles.‎

To achieve that, the 33-year-old French national said he met with the bankruptcy trustee appointed by the ‎Tokyo court to commence civil rehabilitation proceedings.‎

‎“That’s the only way any bankruptcy law can reasonably work. And yet, in this case, it ‎produces an egregiously distasteful outcome in that the shareholders of MtGox would ‎walk away with the value of over 160,000 bitcoin as a result of what happened.”‎

Karpeles explained that MtGox has two ‎shareholders, Tibanne and Jed McCaleb. The Tokyo-based excgange is 88-percent owned by Tibanne, ‎which Karpelès is its sole owner. The remaining 12 percent is held by MtGox’s original ‎creator Jed McCaleb, a San Francisco-based programmer who currently works with ‎Stellar.‎

Throughout the AMA threads, Karpelès revealed that in addition to his own legal troubles, ‎Tibanne is currently undergoing bankruptcy proceedings. As such, although he doesn’t mind redistributing the BTC/BCH to creditors if it ever happens to be ‎given to him, but he hopes “things won’t get that far as a very ‎large chunk would end being lost to taxes, that’s why Civil ‎Rehabilitation is so important.”‎

To date, Karpelès has denied any wrongdoing and blamed hackers for the lost bitcoins, pointing to a software security flaw.