Former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles insists that the 80,000 Bitcoin (BTC) that Dr. Wright claims as his were stolen from the exchange in March 2011. Cryptology experts are siding with Karpeles.

The Bitcoins were stolen
Karpeles confirmed to Cointelegraph that the Bitcoins residing in 1FeexV6bAHb8ybZjqQMjJrcCrHGW9sb6uF were stolen from Mt:

„I confirm, this was confirmed in 2011 and the records are also part of the publicly available court documents.“

Furthermore, speculating about Dr. Wright’s motivation in this turn of events in the Tulip Trust saga, Karpeles said that the nChain’s chief scientist is only trying to present some „evidence“ of his condition:

„To be honest, I think Wright is just trying to use this address as ‚evidence‘ that he is an early Bitcoin user with tons of BTC, and is in a difficult situation where he is either a thief (if he keeps his claims up) or a fraud (if he admits to being wrong).

The lawsuit against the former Mt. Gox CEO could create a „dangerous precedent“

The court accepted the skype transcript
Meanwhile, Dr. Wright is questioning the validity of the evidence that these Bitcoins were ever stolen from Mt:

„The only prosecution evidence regarding the origin of 1Feex Bitcoin that I am aware of is an alleged Skype chat between Mark Karpeles and Jed McCaleb, but that document is only a text file rather than a validated Skype record.“ No other evidence or credible evidence has been presented, such as internal/accounting records from Mt Gox“.

It should be noted that the Skype transcript was accepted by the court and its authenticity has not been disputed by the parties.

The evidence contradicts Dr. Wright

Dr. Wright says he made an agreement to acquire these Bitcoins in late February 2011, finalizing the transaction on March 1, 2011:

„I agreed to buy the bitcoin at the 1Feex address at the end of February 2011 and it was transferred to that address on March 1 of that year. The total amount of Bitcoin, which is now owned by Tulip Trading Limited, remains at that address today“.

Craig Wright denies hacking Mt. Gox and says he bought the Bitcoins
He didn’t specify if the transaction occurred on Mt. Gox.

Kim Nilsson, a cyber security expert whose team spent months analyzing a series of attacks that led to the eventual collapse of Mt. Gox, completely refuted Dr. Wright’s story in an email to Cointelegraph:

„The strongest independent evidence I can provide is that the transaction that sent the 80k BTC to that address was financed entirely by Mt. Gox addresses, and that the MtGox wallet at that time was completely emptied by this transaction, which is not normal behavior and is not compatible with Wright’s claims of only buying coins from some third party. (And who is this third party, then?)“.

It should be noted that Mt. Gox’s order books were leaked and the leaked documents did not reveal a transaction in this amount.