Mt. Gox Finds 200,000 Bitcoins In Forgotten Wallet

You might think a bitcoin exchange that was doing as much business at Mt. Gox was at one time would have a system in place that would allow it to keep track of where exactly all the bitcoin it was holding for customers was. That would be an incorrect assumption though after the firm admitted to having lost about 850,000 bitcoins during its operations.

Mt. Gox has been in some big trouble over the last several months with the company first halting withdrawals due to a technical issue having to do with potential fraud. Mt. Gox later filed bankruptcy in the US. The bitcoin exchange has now announced that it has found 200,000 missing bitcoins in an old wallet it had forgot about.

That old digital wallet had been around since 2011 and had bitcoins worth about $116 million. With the recovery of 200,000 bitcoins, the total number of virtual coins lost by Mt. Gox now stands at about 650,000.

The CEO of Mt. Gox says that it had some old format wallets that were used in the past that the firm thought no longer had bitcoins in them. However, it discovered that the old format wallet indeed held a huge number of bitcoins. It's easy to wonder if Mt. Gox might have deleted some other old format wallets that held huge numbers of coins, accounting for some of the hundreds of thousands of bitcoins still missing.

SOURCE: BBC