Recently the MtGox civil rehabilitation trustee, Nobuaki Kobayashi, announced a six month delay in proceedings due to disapproved claims still being disputed. The trustee doesn't refer to it directly, but the elephant in the room causing this delay is Peter Vessenes' CoinLab, who after a failed partnership attempt with MtGox in 2012/2013 is now demanding an outrageous $16B USD from the MtGox civil rehabilitation estate. There have been various theories floating around how CoinLab could possibly be justifying this number, with little insight into their actual arguments, a problem not helped by CoinLab's attempts to seal official Japanese creditor records in order to conceal their actions. Recently though I acquired a copy of the last round of petitions to the Tokyo District Court, and have spent the last week dredging through the legal Japanese to get to the bottom of the situation.

As part of the ongoing lawsuit against Craig Wright by the relatives of Dave Kleiman and in response to a court order to reveal details of Wright's supposed bitcoin holdings (including a long hinted-at blind trust), a filing about Wright's supposed bitcoin holdings was recently unsealed. While the bitcoin addresses contained within are redacted, it turns out they're not hard to guess. Background Craig Wright has for years claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the unknown inventor of Bitcoin, through a complicated web of stories where it seems every piece of supposed corroborating evidence exposed to public scrutiny ends up being shown to be fraudulent in some way. To date, no one has moved any of Satoshi's bitcoins or signed any messages with his private keys since he disappeared. None of this seems to deter Wright's fans who follow his "Satoshi's Vision" (SV) fork of Bitcoin, to whom Wright's angry technobabble speeches are just evidence of a genius pla...

Earlier today news broke of an arrest in Greece of a Russian national suspected of running a large-scale money laundering operation focused on Bitcoin. The man has since been publicly identified as Alexander Vinnik, 38, and over $4 billion USD is said to have been trafficked through the operation since 2011. We won't beat around the bush with it: Vinnik is our chief suspect for involvement in the MtGox theft (or the laundering of the proceeds thereof). This is the result of years of patient work, and these findings were surely independently uncovered by other investigators as well. Everyone who worked on the case have patiently kept quiet while forwarding findings to law enforcement, so as not to tip suspects off and to maximize the chances of arrests. With such an arrest actually happening, we think today might — finally — be the day when we can begin talking about what we've actually been doing all this time and what we found. Thank you for your patience.

Recently the MtGox civil rehabilitation trustee, Nobuaki Kobayashi, announced a six month delay in proceedings due to disapproved claims still being disputed. The trustee doesn't refer to it directly, but the elephant in the room causing this delay is Peter Vessenes' CoinLab, who after a failed partnership attempt with MtGox in 2012/2013 is now demanding an outrageous $16B USD from the MtGox civil rehabilitation estate. There have been various theories floating around how CoinLab could possibly be justifying this number, with little insight into their actual arguments, a problem not helped by CoinLab's attempts to seal official Japanese creditor records in order to conceal their actions. Recently though I acquired a copy of the last round of petitions to the Tokyo District Court, and have spent the last week dredging through the legal Japanese to get to the bottom of the situation. DISCLAIMER: While I am more familiar with the underlying subject matter than most people, I...

Today some news landed about a  $10B lawsuit against Craig Wright  (the Australian man who claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin), and it is an interesting read, but unfortunately for anyone involved, its claims have little basis in reality. The lawsuit purports that Wright fraudulently acquired large number of bitcoins owned by Dave Kleiman through forging various documents, but the very existence of those bitcoins in the first place is just another fantasy. I had previously seen some of the material included as exhibits in the lawsuit, and my opinion was that all the documents that made specific testable claims as to owning bitcoins were relatively easy to debunk as simple backdated forgeries (possibly for use in Wright's alleged tax fraud schemes). I Am Not A Lawyer, but it seems somewhat fitting that Wright now finds himself sued by someone taking many of those claims at face value, as Wright's seemingly only defense would be to allow those p...

Earlier today news broke of an arrest in Greece of a Russian national suspected of running a large-scale money laundering operation focused on Bitcoin. The man has since been publicly identified as Alexander Vinnik, 38, and over $4 billion USD is said to have been trafficked through the operation since 2011. We won't beat around the bush with it: Vinnik is our chief suspect for involvement in the MtGox theft (or the laundering of the proceeds thereof). This is the result of years of patient work, and these findings were surely independently uncovered by other investigators as well. Everyone who worked on the case have patiently kept quiet while forwarding findings to law enforcement, so as not to tip suspects off and to maximize the chances of arrests. With such an arrest actually happening, we think today might — finally — be the day when we can begin talking about what we've actually been doing all this time and what we found. Thank you for your patience. Summary We're go...

July 11 was the first day of proceedings for the anticipated trial of Mark Karpelès, CEO of the bankrupt MtGox bitcoin exchange. Karpelès was charged with creation and manipulation of private electronic records, as well as embezzlement of customer funds, or embezzlement of company funds, or breach of trust, in that order. I was present in the courtroom for the entire first day, and I expect there will be a lot of interpretations and extrapolations based on the limited early information that will no doubt circulate online and in the media, so I will attempt to flesh out and explain what is actually going on through some brief commentary. The proceedings While the trial is technically open to the public, the actual courtroom was very small with a very limited number of seats, for which court clerks arranged a lottery. While this is common practice for any court cases deemed likely to attract a lot of interest, it means most people who made the trip to the courthouse never got to attend; ...