Kolin Burges confronts Mt.Gox CEO Mark Karpeles. Video by Jon Southurst.
Immediately following the resignation, Mt.Gox also deleted the entire contents of it Twitter feed. There has been no comment from Mt.Gox about the reason for this dramatic move.
Calls for Karpeles to be removed from the Bitcoin Foundation have grown more frequent in recent weeks, as his troubled Tokyo-based exchange has fallen further out of synch, both in terms of security and price, from the rest of the Bitcoin community. A petition to have Karpeles removed from the Foundation first surfaced on Change.org ten days ago, and had reached over 1,700 signatures by the time Karpeles resigned.
This latest twist in the Mt.Gox story follows a month of almost entirely bad news for the exchange. Following a period of increasingly slow withdrawal requests, users started a protest campaign outside the company’s Tokyo office. A few days later, Mt.Gox halted withdrawals of Bitcoin citing vulnerability to the transaction malleability bug, cutting off access to user funds and causing the price of Bitcoin on the exchange to plummet below $95. Following news that the same glitch had wiped out nearly $2.7 million in Bitcoin on black market site Silk Road 2.0, rumors began to surface that Mt.Gox might be insolvent, prompting more protests and growing concerns about the future of the exchange.
Prices on Mt.Gox, which had been recovering in recent days, plummeted back to $180 following these developments. Bitcoin prices are currently trading around $570 on other exchanges.
