Bitcoin is big money. When Mt. Gox went belly up, hundreds of millions in Bitcoin up and disappeared. Now, the troubled exchange just happens to have stumbled into 200,000 ‘coin it thought was lost, or roughly 116 million dollars.
According to documents from Mt. Gox Chief Executive Officer Mark Karpeles and cited by the Wall Street Journal, on March 7th the exchange came across the crazy cache (199,999.99 Bitcoins to be exact) in an old Bitcoin wallet, thought to be empty and out of use. NOPE! And that digital cash is worth over a hundred million at current rates of ~$US600 per coin.
This helps mitigate the Mt. Gox disaster a little bit, bringing the number of missing coins down from around 850,000 (750k in user coin plus 100k of Mt. Gox-owned cryptocurrency) to around 650,000. That’s still a lot of missing cash, but it’s not every day you just happen to find a cool $US100 mil, even if that’s only part of what you’re missing. [WSJ via CNET]