Other names MagicalTux | Name Mark Karpeles | |
Full Name Mark Marie Robert Karpeles Born June 1, 1985 (age 38) ( 1985-06-01 ) Chenove, France | ||
Mark karpeles bonus scenes the rise and rise of bitcoin
Mark Marie Robert Karpeles (born June 1, 1985), also sometimes known by his online alias MagicalTux, was the CEO of bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox. He moved to Japan in 2009.
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Mark karpeles retells the mt gox story
Early life and education
Karpeles was born in 1985 in Chenove, France, the child of Anne-Robert Karpeles, a geologist. He was raised in Dijon. Between 1995 and 2000, Karpeles was educated at College Prieure de Binson in Chatillon-sur-Marne and Prieure De Binson in Dormans. He then spent one year at Lycee Claude Bernard in Paris, before completing his education in 2003 at Lycee Louis Armand in Paris.
Career
According to Karpeles' LinkedIn page, he worked from 2003 to 2005 at Linux Cyberjoueurs as a software developer and network administrator. Karpeles is a PHP developer, and has contributed to the language's official repository of extensions with proctitle, which allows the name of the current process to be changed on Linux systems.
Karpeles founded Tibanne Co. Ltd. in 2009. He is CEO. He was a founding member of the Bitcoin Foundation, created in 2012 with a mission to standardize and promote bitcoin, and served on its board until February 2014.
Karpeles acquired 88% of the Tokyo-based company Mt. Gox from programmer Jed McCaleb in 2011. Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy in Japan on February 28, 2014 and for Chapter 15, Title 11, United States Code bankruptcy in the United States (Texas) in March 2014.
Karpeles was subpoenaed by the United States Department of the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network to appear in Washington, D.C. to provide testimony on April 18, 2014. Karpeles, in a court filing by Mt. Gox lawyers, responded that he does not have a lawyer for this matter and therefore declined to appear. Karpeles sought to appear in D.C. to testify on May 5, 2014.
According to a joint report by Cyrus Farivar of Ars Technica and Pierre Alonso of Le Monde, Karpeles was found guilty of fraud when he was tried in absentia in France in 2010. He also admitted to having "pirated" a server to French authorities. He was sentenced to a year in jail but has not yet served his sentence.
Ross William Ulbricht, while on trial for operating the undercover Silk Road marketplace, claimed in 2015 that the pseudonymous "Dread Pirate Roberts" behind Silk Road was not him but Mark Karpeles. Karpeles publicly denied the claim on Twitter, and Ulbricht was eventually found guilty.
Arrest and prosecution
Karpeles was arrested on 1 August 2015 by Japanese police on suspicion of having accessed the exchange's computer system to falsify data on its outstanding balance, he was later released then re-arrested and allegedly charged with embezzlement.