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 The group justified the near-zero price citing an "information
vacuum" over Mt. Gox's missing bitcoins that made it hard to place a
value on the lost digital currency, the paper said. (http://r.reuters.com/peq48v)
Mt. Gox, once the largest bitcoin exchange, filed for bankruptcy in
Japan in February, saying hackers had stolen 750,000 bitcoins
belonging to its customers and 100,000 of its own bitcoins after
exploiting a security flaw in its software.
The investor group includes Brock Pierce, a former child
actor-turned entrepreneur, and venture capitalists William Quigley
and Matthew Roszak.
The group hopes to revive the exchange and set aside 50 percent of
its transaction fees to pay back burned customers and other
creditors over time, the Journal said.
Mt. Gox said in March it "found" 200,000 bitcoins in an old-format
online wallet which it had thought was empty, raising creditors'
hopes of recovering some of their lost digital wealth.
The bitcoin exchange's creditors would have the option of receiving
a prorated payment from the 200,000 recovered bitcoins, an estimated
20 percent recovery value on their claims, or receiving the
equivalent amount in equity in the new exchange, the paper said.
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A form of electronic money independent of traditional banking,
bitcoins started circulating in 2009 and have become the most
prominent of several fledgling digital currencies.
The acquisition must be approved by a Japanese bankruptcy court.
However, the near-zero valuation of the proposed deal could prove to
be a hurdle, the Journal said.
(Reporting by Supantha Mukherjee in Bangalore;
editing by Simon
Jennings and Sriraj Kalluvila)
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