Mt. Gox was a Tokyo-based exchange that began trading bitcoin in 2010 and became the best-known bitcoin exchange of its era.
The collapse
In February 2014 it halted withdrawals and filed for bankruptcy protection in Tokyo, saying a very large share of customer and company bitcoin was missing after years of undetected theft. Customers who had left coins there lost access overnight. (We leave out the loss figures because we could not verify them in a primary source.)
A decade of waiting
The case moved into civil rehabilitation under trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi. Repayments began in 2024. On 16 October 2026 the trustee, with court permission, moved the deadline for the main repayments from 31 October 2026 to 31 October 2027, because many creditors had still not completed the necessary procedures.
What Bitcoin offers instead
The failure was not Bitcoin's: the blockchain kept working. The weak point was trusting a company with keys. Bitcoin is one of the few assets you can hold yourself, with no intermediary able to lose it. See Not your keys, not your coins.