Mt. Gox, the troubled Bitcoin exchange, claims it has found 200,000 bitcoins that it had "forgotten" about.
The Tokyo-based Mt. Gox, which is now under bankruptcy protection, announced the find on its website. Mark Kapeles, the head of the exchange, said the cache was found March 7. The bitcoins — worth about $118 million at the time of writing — were stored in an "old format wallet which was used prior to June 2011," according to the company.
See also: A Complete, Interactive History of Bitcoin
Mt. Gox moved the bitcoins offline on March 14-15 "for security reasons."
Members of the Bitcoin community were skeptical about the announcement.
"Classic scam — claim everything is gone, then make people relieved when you give them back a small percentage of what they lost," one Redditor, Logical, wrote.
"Translation: [Karpeles] thought he would be protected if he went 'bankrupt' and only declared the cash assets. Eventually he came to realize that he couldn't hide their movements from the public eye, and thus 'found' them, looking in 'wallets', I.E., the exact place you would look if you were actually looking," another Redditor, Frothface, added.
According to a Reuters report, Mt. Gox's admission came after a U.S. judge in Chicago allowed some of the exchange's activities to be tracked.
"Today in court we got relief ... specifically to track the 180,000 bitcoins, which we've been monitoring. Hours later, Mt. Gox claimed it 'found' these bitcoins ... it appears Mt. Gox realized we were close and decided to acknowledge that it owned these 180,000-200,000 bitcoins," Steven L. Woodrow, a partner at law firm Edelson, wrote in an email to Reuters.
Edelson is representing Gregory Greene, an Illinois resident who claims Mt. Gox engineered a massive fraud. Greene proposes that his suit be given class-action status.
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