Former Mt Gox head Karpeles plans new bitcoin tech business

@Kenji Fujimori, read again. I said I DON'T disagree with your comments in general. I was simply pointing out that your statement "has not spent a day in jail" was factually incorrect.

I have absolutely no idea whether he stole the coins or didn't.

I suppose the possibilities are either A. He did, or B. Someone else did. It is extremely rare for a Japanese court to find someone innocent, so there is certainly a possibility that B is correct (especially as they actually have a suspect).

Apple and Facebook? A little out of touch. It is China that is outpacing Japan and the US. Funny he does not recognize this. Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu, etc are the ones to watch

Headline seems to be misleading. The article states his company will be working on a blockchain-based OS. Blockchain and Bitcoin are not the same thing.

Seems not too many people here trust this guy...

Additionally cause he's a free man, he can withdraw a lot of physical money from his Swiss bank account and stash it in his luggage, which would avoid taxes altogether and he would have massive capital all in hard cash.

No different to say the scene in Wolf of Wall Street, when Leonardo Dicaprios friends in the movies stashed hundreds of thousands in their clothes taped as one example..

Hes lawyer is also in on it and potentially would have access to his accounts and nice big commission to sweaten the trust further..

How hard would it be for Karpeles to transfer those stolen bit coins via his wife in Japan or via friends, or on an offshore Swiss bank account.

Think about it. He isn't stupid. Of course he wouldn't transfer hundreds of millions of dollars all in one go to not sound alarm bells or the taxation for international money transferral taxea. He would trickle it down, so several thousand dollars a month or per week. To avoid any major alarms or concerns being raised...

Check the finer details.. Of course the Swiss banks protects all their shady clientele, even the yakuza uses Swiss bank accounts...

For those who don't remember the Maddoff Ponzi Scam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Madoff

Direct parallels to Karpeles scam

AND has he returned one yen back to anyone in Japan, yet alone to customers in the US and abroad? Bit here he is soaking up good PR piece for his new snake oil business

ADK99

Wont don't you disagree about? That it's ok for him to steal close to a billion dollars?

He clearly stole the bitcoins, regardless whatever way you want to spin tbe story and imagine otherwise.. Reality is reality.

11 months justifies his actions does it? Prosecutors demanded 11 years which is light compared to Bernie Maddoff Ponzi scheme for example..

Yet Carlos Ghosn another French national who is innocent is destroyed, at least Carlos built an empire and Mark built a Ponzi scam trap.. Go figure

@Kenji Fujimori - whilst I don't disagree with the general thrust of your points, he DID spend 11 months in jail.

Karpeles, a computer prodigy with an interest in Japanese animation and games, moved to Japan in 2009.

Um no.. His first venture in Japan was a game company and all the software engineers developed his companies software.. Most of which was open source

Did he repay his previous customers their lost money? No

The article seems to whitewash his sinister true character

He steals close to a billion dollars on a USB stick and his lawyer claims it went 'missing' has not spent a day in jail, and now he thinks we will throw money to his second Ponzi scheme!!!??

formidable....really?!

I'm wondering if it's still his love for animation and games that prompted him to put up another business here despite all these legal problems, or probably hoping that there are still plenty of gullible people to entice.

Surely he'll be deported soon enough anyway.

Come on Marc, be realistic, how can anyone trust you with any piece of technology now ?!

He has plenty of stolen bitcoin he needs to launder it thus starts a company.

All those believers that put their cash into Mt Gox and it vanished like magic....

Yeah, good luck with that! I'm sure nobody will be dumb enough to trust this guy ever again.