On a frigid February morning in 2014, Kolin Burges stood outside the Tokyo office of Mt. Gox, holding a handwritten cardboard sign and seeking answers from the bitcoin exchange’s CEO, Mark Karpeles, regarding his missing tokens.
Fast forward eleven years, and the legendary sign, symbolizing the first significant financial scandal in the crypto world, is now set to be auctioned on Scarce.City, with a starting price of 4.5 BTC (approximately $383,000). The auction kicks off later Friday and concludes on April 3.
“At the time, I never considered it could hold any value,” Burges shared in an interview in Hong Kong. “I thought maybe I would write a book about it someday, but the sign itself did not seem like a big deal. It’s incredible how much things have changed.”
Burges had traveled from London to Tokyo after Mt. Gox, then the leading bitcoin exchange, inexplicably halted withdrawals.
“One morning, I just knew I had to be in Tokyo,” Burges recalled. “I didn’t really have a solid plan, but something inside me told me I needed to be there.”
“When my withdrawal didn’t go through, I started to feel an overwhelming sense of dread. Initially, I wasn’t completely convinced, but as time dragged on, it became more obvious that something was very wrong.”
His spontaneous protest soon captured global media attention, even catching the eye of established financial publications.
Burges described those early days in Tokyo as almost surreal.
“The moment I confronted Karpeles was charged with intensity,” he recalled. “I demanded answers, but he just brushed me off, attributing the issues to technical difficulties. It felt surreal standing there in the snow, aware that a significant crisis was unfolding.”
As Burges protested outside the Mt. Gox offices, the exchange’s attempts to manage the public relations disaster became increasingly transparent.
“Mt. Gox kept offering false hope, but it was clear to everyone that the situation was spiraling out of control,” Burges stated. “They even invited us inside to protest privately, as a tactic to keep us out of sight. It was absurd and desperate.”
Burges recalls having drinks with an unnamed Mt. Gox staff member who pressured him to stop his protest.
“At one point, representatives from Mt. Gox met with me in secret, cautioning that if protests continued, the exchange would collapse and everyone would lose their bitcoins,” he said. “That conversation revealed that they knew far more than they let on, and that the situation was far worse than they were admitting publicly.”
At one point, Burges recalled, a representative attempted to pay for drinks with a Mt. Gox credit card—only for it to be declined.
“That was an ominous sign that their banking relationships were crumbling,” Burges noted.
Mt. Gox declared bankruptcy in February 2014, just days after Burges began his protest.
Seven years later, Karpeles was acquitted of embezzlement by a Tokyo court, receiving a suspended sentence for data manipulation.
In September of last year, Karpeles launched a new cryptocurrency exchange called EllipX, along with a crypto ratings company named Ungox in 2022.
In an interview related to Korea Blockchain Week in August 2024, Karpeles mentioned that had he possessed modern blockchain analytical tools and third-party custodians in 2014, Mt. Gox “wouldn’t have unfolded as it did.”