Infamous Mt. Gox Protest Sign Now Up for Grabs at Auction

The Sign That Shouted for Lost Bitcoin Is Now a Piece of Crypto History—and It’s for Sale

What started as a desperate plea scrawled on cardboard has become one of the most iconic artifacts from the early days of cryptocurrency.

In February 2014, Kolin Burges flew from London to Tokyo, frustrated and suspicious after Mt. Gox—the largest bitcoin exchange at the time—suddenly halted customer withdrawals. Standing alone in the cold, he held up a hand-lettered sign demanding answers: “Mt. Gox, Where Is Our Money?” The image of Burges outside the company’s offices would become a defining symbol of crypto’s first major collapse.

Now, more than a decade later, that very sign is going up for auction. Hosted by digital art and collectibles platform Scarce.City, the auction starts Friday with a reserve price of 4.5 BTC (approximately $383,000), and runs through April 3.

“I never imagined the sign would be worth anything,” Burges told CoinDesk this week in Hong Kong. “It was just a way to get attention, to put pressure on Karpeles. I didn’t think it would turn into a relic.”

That “Karpeles” was Mark Karpeles, Mt. Gox’s elusive CEO, who eventually met Burges outside the building but offered little more than vague assurances about technical glitches and internal issues. As Burges remembers it, the tension was palpable.

“They tried everything to get us out of the public eye,” he said. “Invited us inside, hinted that continued protests might cause the exchange to collapse. Looking back, that was a sign they were already on the edge.”

One moment still sticks with him: a Mt. Gox representative tried paying for drinks with a company credit card—and it was declined. “That’s when it really sank in. The collapse wasn’t coming. It was already happening.”

Just days later, Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy, revealing it had lost or misappropriated over 800,000 BTC. The fallout marked the beginning of regulatory scrutiny and skepticism that would haunt the crypto space for years.

Though Karpeles was later cleared of embezzlement in 2021, he was convicted of data manipulation and received a suspended sentence. Since then, he’s launched new ventures, including the Ungox crypto ratings firm in 2022 and a new trading platform, EllipX, in 2024.

In hindsight, Karpeles claimed the collapse could have been avoided with today’s tech. “If we had blockchain analysis tools or third-party custodians back then, Mt. Gox wouldn’t have happened,” he said at a conference last year.

For Burges, watching the sign resurface now—priced in bitcoin, no less—is a strange full-circle moment.

“It was born from frustration and a desire for transparency,” he said. “And now, it’s part of the very history I was caught in.”