Man confronts Mt.Gox CEO Karpeles over frozen Bitcoin accounts

Inspired by the recent three-day “sit in” protest at the Mt.Gox offices by Australian Bitcoin activist CoinSeacher, Kolin Burges decided to take action as well. The London-based software developer moved his holdings in Litecoin to Mt.Gox at the end of last year, only to see his funds completely frozen earlier this month. Fed up with Mt.Gox’s lack of response and complete lockdown on funds, he hopped a 12-hour flight to Tokyo to confront the company’s leadership directly.

“They haven’t answered anybody’s support requests,” Burges said in the video. “They seem to have just taken people’s money. They’ve taken my money. I’m pretty annoyed about that.”

After waiting all morning in the freezing cold, Burges was able to directly confront Mt.Gox’s CEO Mark Karpeles. Not surprisingly, the T-shirt clad Karpeles had little to say. Karpeles declined to release Burges’ Bitcoins, and didn’t respond at all to the question “Do you still have everyone’s bitcoins?”

Following the confrontation, Burges echoed the Bitcoin industry’s growing concerns about Mt.Gox’s future. “I don’t expect their company is going to last much longer,” he said. “I think it’s about to collapse, and I expect that no one is going to get their money back.”

While Mt.Gox has been the focus of the current “transaction malleability” debacle, customer funds have been increasingly inaccessible for months. The company has claimed a variety of issues are at fault — from technical issues to ongoing legal and regulatory pressure — leading many insiders to suspect that liquidity problems are actually at the root of the Mt.Gox’s woes.