Why does mtgox need id

The year-old Karpeles was born in France, but after spending some time in Israel, he settled down in Japan.

There he got married, posted cat videos and became a father. In , he acquired the Mt. Gox exchange in from an American entrepreneur named Jed McCaleb. McCaleb had registered the Mtgox. He never followed through on that idea, but in late , McCaleb decided to repurpose the domain as a bitcoin exchange.

The idea was simple: he'd provide a single place to connect bitcoin buyers and sellers. But soon, McCaleb was getting wires for tens of thousands of dollars and, realizing he was in over his head, he sold the site to Karpeles, an avid programmer, foodie, and bitcoin enthusiast who called himself Magicaltux in online forums. Karpeles soon set about rewriting the site's back-end software, eventually turning it into the world's most popular bitcoin exchange.

A June hack took the site offline for several days, and according to bitcoin enthusiasts Jesse Powell and Roger Ver, who helped the company respond to the hack, Karpeles was strangely nonchalant about the crisis. But he and Mt. Gox eventually made good on their obligations, earning a reputation as honest players in the bitcoin community.

Other bitcoin companies had been hacked and lost customer funds. Most of the time, they simply folded. But Karpeles and Mt. Gox did not. Gox's largest stake holder, appeared to become an extremely wealthy man. Karpeles owns 88 percent of the company and McCaleb 12 percent, according to a leaked Mt. Gox business plan. When Karpeles was interviewed by Reuters in the spring of -- seated, inexplicably, on top of a blue pilates ball -- he was a major player in the bitcoin world.

He had ponied up 5, bitcoins to help kickstart the Bitcoin Foundation, a not-for-profit bitcoin software development and lobbying group, where he was a board member he has since resigned.

But beneath it all, some say, Mt. Gox was a disaster in waiting. Last year, a Tokyo-based software developer sat down in Gox's first-floor meeting room to talk about working for the company. Soon, however, there were some serious red flags. Gox, he says, didn't use any type of version control software -- a standard tool in any professional software development environment.

This meant that any coder could accidentally overwrite a colleague's code if they happened to be working on the same file. According to this developer, the world's largest bitcoin exchange had only recently introduced a test environment, meaning that, previously, untested software changes were pushed out to the exchanges customers -- not the kind of thing you'd see on a professionally run financial services website.

And, he says, there was only one person who could approve changes to the site's source code: Mark Karpeles. And eventually, that led to the company not having the bitcoins to return deposits; at the time of the creation of the crisis strategy document, it held just 2, bitcoin, while customer deposits totalled over , In early February, MtGox suspended bitcoin withdrawals as well as cash withdrawals.

According to the leaked document, the plan was that Karpeles would ask outside investors to give the company enough bitcoin to return to solvency. Their motivation for contributing would be to prevent the collapse of the single company most identified with bitcoin. Selkis writes that that plan was put in action, but with less-than-stellar results. But the investors did not buy in. This article is more than 7 years old.

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