the Bitcoins back. Within a
month, Jed acknowledged he
was defenseless against this.
“I’m
just
eating
the
charge which sucks so please,
please don’t do this,” he
pleaded on the forum.
After
this
post,
the
problem got worse, not better.
Jed tried to resolve disputes
before they escalated, even if
it meant losing money, so he
didn’t
have
his
PayPal
account shut down altogether.
But one morning he opened
up his laptop and found that
PayPal had done just that,
leaving him without an easy
way to get money from
customers.
Meanwhile,
people who had money stuck
in
Jed’s
frozen
PayPal
account complained about the
difficulty of getting it back.
“I do this in my spare
time for free so don’t get all
uppity,” Jed wrote to his
critics.
This was clearly not what
Jed signed up for when he
opened Mt. Gox. He had
never intended for it to
become a full-time job. He
was motivated by working on
interesting challenges, and
Mt.
Gox
was
instead
becoming a series of boring
and stressful problems. Like
many people interested in big
challenges and bold solutions,
Jed got bored by the details of
seeing those solutions to their
end—something that would
come back to haunt the
community later.
On the hunt for someone
who could help relieve him of
the burden of work on Mt.
Gox, Jed began chatting
online with a user named
MagicalTux, whom Jed soon
came to know as Mark
Karpeles. Mark was almost
always online because it was
one of the only places where
he felt comfortable in the
world. A chubby twenty-four-
year-old, Mark had been
raised in France alternately
by
his
mother
and
grandmother, who didn’t get
along and continually moved
him between schools. At age
ten, Mark was sent to a
Catholic boarding school in
the Champagne region of
France—a school he looked
back on with fear and
anxiety. Even as a youngster,
Mark
had
tremendous
difficulty
with
human
interaction, while the logic of
the computer had spoken to
him naturally. He would ace
his math classes—and could
assemble and disassemble his
calculators—but he struggled
with
literature
and
the
humanities, and eventually
dropped out of school, not
long before he was arrested
for some of his hacking
activities. Since then, he’d
had a peripatetic lifestyle,
looking for a place where he
could feel at home. He first
tried Israel, thinking it might
help him get closer to his
Catholicism, but he soon felt
as lonely as ever, and the
servers he was running kept
getting disrupted by rocket
fire from Gaza. Back in
France, he got a job as a
programmer but soon fell out
with his boss. During this
period, he would make rather
melancholy
posts
to
a
generally unread blog in
which
he
discussed
his
situation.
“To tell the truth, I always
felt a sort of emptiness in my
existence, somewhat as if I
wasn’t really in the right
place, or as if I was missing
something I needed in order
to really live, and not just
survive,” he wrote in 2006.
Mark finally got a chance
to visit Japan, which he had
been drawn to since reading a
series of Manga comics his
mother had given him. When
he arrived the first time and
checked into his capsule
hotel, the part of him that had
always been afraid in France
was put to rest by the
stoicism and politeness of
Japanese culture. It didn’t
hurt that the girls in Japan
seemed to actually respect the
fact
that
he
was
a
programmer.
By the time he met Jed
online, Mark had lived in
Tokyo for more than a year
and set up his own web-
hosting company that rented
out server space. He learned
about Bitcoin from a French
customer in Peru who wanted
an easier way to pay the bills
Mark sent him. As Mark
dived into Bitcoin in late
2010, he discovered that it
had already attracted an
unusually
cohesive
and
friendly online community,
the sort of social setting in
which
he
could
feel
comfortable.
He
would
engage in endless chats at all
hours about everything from
obscure Japanese payments
systems to the identity of
Satoshi, who Mark was
confident was not Japanese.
“I’m a coder and already
worked with tons of japanese
people here, and the way the
code
is
made
is
also
completely different from
anything I ever saw in japan
(but not so different from
more western stuff),” Mark
wrote one night on the chat
channel.
Online, Mark had a brash
cockiness
that
he
never
showed in real life—so brash,
in
fact,
that
it
was
occasionally off-putting. But
he lived alone with his cat,
Tibanne, and was always
available and willing to help
out. He volunteered to help
Martti Malmi host the Bitcoin
website on his servers. And
when
Martti
offered
to
connect
Jed
with
his
European bank, so Mt. Gox
could begin accepting euros,
Mark helped Jed set up the
back end. The work gave Jed
confidence
in
Mark’s
abilities.
As the price of Bitcoin
rose to nearly 30 cents per
coin by the end of December
2010—thanks, in no small
part, to the attention from
WikiLeaks—Jed
called
a
lawyer in New York to ask
about
the
regulatory
implications of running a
business like Mt. Gox. The
lawyer said it was unclear
how the government would
view Bitcoin. In the forums,
there were lengthy debates
about whether Bitcoin would
be considered money, which
would be subject to bank
regulators, or some sort of
commodity,
which
would
come
under
different
government
oversight.
Whatever the outcome, the
lawyer told Jed that he would
probably have to eventually
register
as
a
money-
transmission business, which
would
involve
extensive
applications and lots of legal
bills.
Jed turned to Mark for
advice, seeking his thoughts
on a four-page document Jed
had put together to send to