MtGox claimed it has debts of $63 million and assets of just $38 million. The company’s CEO Mark Karpeles even had to bow in apology at a press conference at the Justice Ministry in Tokyo last week.


Once the largest Bitcoin exchange filed for bankruptcy protection in Japan, with MtGox blaming a weakness in its system for the sudden collapse. The company’s CEO Mark Karpeles, bowing, had to apologize at a news conference for causing trouble to so many people. He said that he wanted to start a criminal complaint against the hacking attack which killed the service. However it appeared that he had no specific means to do so.

At the moment, MtGox had liquid liabilities of $63 million, dwarfing its total assets of $38 million. The exchange admitted it had 127,000 creditors in bankruptcy, more than 1,000 of whom are from Japan.

The news conference in Japan was MtGox CEO’s second public statement since the BitTorrent exchange took down its website a few days ago, following a terse comment released at the same time.

The “weakness” Karpeles was talking about is believed to be a problem related to “transaction malleability”, a loophole in the Bitcoin system that was exploited by hackers to get free Bitcoins from the website. Some of the currency traders think that MtGox filing for bankruptcy isn’t the end of Bitcoin, but it still marks the beginning of the end of Bitcoin in its current form. They point out that within the last year the market has seen ever-increasing usage of cyber currency, and with its huge volatility in value and blows from banks and regulators, there were growing pains as Bitcoin evolved and the MtGox bankruptcy was part of that.