Mt. Gox

WITHDRAWALS SUSPENDED.

Mt. Gox filed for civil rehabilitation on 28 February 2014, reporting missing bitcoins at the time.

Rain runs down the glass, but the message behind it does not change. A customer stands outside with a piece of paper in hand. The screen says the withdrawal is pending; the chains say something worse. This is HISTROVE’s imagined doorway into the collapse of Mt. Gox, where an ordinary action, taking out your own money, had become a question nobody could answer.

On 28 February 2014, the Tokyo-based exchange applied to the Tokyo District Court for civil rehabilitation, a form of insolvency protection. Its website had closed three days earlier. In its announcement, the company said approximately 750,000 customer bitcoins and 100,000 of its own had disappeared. These were preliminary reported figures, issued while the causes and extent of the losses were still being investigated.

The number on the newspaper therefore belongs to that first account of the crisis. On 20 March, Mt. Gox announced that it had located approximately 200,000 BTC in an old-format wallet, revising its estimate of missing bitcoin to about 650,000. The discovery mattered, but it did not turn the locked door into an open one. Customers had entered a legal process whose questions would take far longer to resolve.

The scene holds on that gap between a number on a screen and the ability to use it. Bitcoin could keep moving across its network while an exchange failed to return the funds in its care. For the figure in the rain, the distinction offers little immediate comfort. HISTROVE places the promise of easy transfer beside a padlock, making custody and trust part of the collection’s story.