Comment
Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
A mobile phone, no ID required. It's clearly an amazing and potentially world-changing technology -- the first viable, decentralized, reliable form of digital cash. It could democratize international finance. But it's also a technology that was pushed forward by a community of people who were unprepared or unwilling to deal with even the basics of everyday business. A new wave of entrepreneurs may bring the digital currency a new level of respectability, but over its first several years, bitcoin has been driven largely by computer geeks with little experience in the financial world. The most prominent example is Mark Karpeles.The Mt. Gox offices in Tokyo.Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WIREDThe King of BitcoinThe 28-year-old Karpeles was born in France, but after spending some time in Israel, he settled down in Japan. There he got married, posted cat videos and became a father. In 2011, he acquired the Mt. Gox exchange in from an American entrepreneur named Jed McCaleb.McCaleb had registered the Mtgox.com web domain in 2007 with the idea of turning it into a trading site for the wildly popular Magic: The Gathering game cards. He never followed through on that idea, but in late 2010, McCaleb decided to repurpose the domain as a bitcoin exchange. The idea was simple: he'd provide a single place to connect bitcoin buyers and sellers. But soon, McCaleb was getting wires for tens of thousands of dollars and, realizing he was in over his head, he sold the site to Karpeles, an avid programmer, foodie, and bitcoin
Add Comment