“The troubled MtGox Bitcoin exchange filed for bankruptcy protection in Japan Friday, saying it had lost nearly half a billion dollars worth of the digital currency in a possible theft.
Mark Karpeles, who has not been seen in public for several days, re-emerged to tell a press conference that his firm’s digital vaults had been almost completely emptied.
“We have lost Bitcoins due to weaknesses in the system,” the France-born Karpeles said in Japanese.
“We are really sorry for causing trouble to all the people concerned,” he said, before bowing deeply.
The company’s lawyer said 750,000 Bitcoins belonging to customers had gone, along with MtGox’s own store of the currency, which she said was around 100,000 units.
That number of Bitcoins would be worth around $477 million dollars, calculated against the price on the Coindesk exchange at 1030 GMT.
The global Bitcoin community was shaken this week by the shuttering of MtGox, which had frozen withdrawals earlier this month because of what the firm said was a bug in the software underpinning Bitcoin that allowed hackers to pilfer them….”
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