Ever find a random dollar bill that you forgot about in your jacket pocket? You know that feeling of pure, unadulterated joy that comes with it? Well, take that feeling, and multiply it by 116,000,000, and you’ll get an idea of how the folks at MtGox felt earlier this month.
You see, the bankrupt bitcoin exchange recently came across 200,000 lost bitcoins, valued at $116 million, in an old digital wallet from 2011.
This discovery brings the total number of bitcoins the firm lost down to 650,000 from 850,000.
If you’re unfamiliar with the company, MtGox was formerly the world’s larget bitcoin exchange site, but had to file for bankruptcy in February when it reported having lost approximately 750,000 customer bitcoins, as well as 100,000 of the company’s own bitcoins, to hackers.
The theft was estimated to be about 7% of all the bitcoins in existence.
“MtGox had certain old-format wallets which were used in the past and which, MtGox thought, no longer held any bitcoins,” MtGox chief executive Mark Karpeles explained in a recent filing.
However, “on March 7, 2014, MtGox confirmed that an old-format wallet which was used prior to June 2011 held a balance of approximately 200,000 bitcoins,” he said.
Karpeles said that the 200,000 bitcoins were moved to offline wallets on March 14 and 15 so that they could not be targeted by hackers.
Story via: bbc.com
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