Fortune has a solid piece on Mark Karpelès, the former owner of Mt. Gox. If you haven't heard of Mt. Gox, it was once the world's largest bitcoin exchange, which flamed out in epic fashion after mysteriously losing 850,000 of its customer's bitcoins. But wait, the plots thickens.
It wasn't until his lawyers had gone home for the day that Karpelès could retreat to his computer, and that's when he noticed the shocking number on his screen. Following his company's collapse, he'd spent days methodically double-checking Mt. Gox's old digital wallets, where the secret alphanumeric keys for accessing Bitcoins are stored. One after another -- a dozen so far -- the wallets had come up empty. But this time, when the blockchain-scanning program finished running after six hours, it had silently served up an unexpected result: He'd found 200,000 Bitcoins, stashed away in an archived file in the cloud -- apparently forgotten and untouched for three years.
So great, you're thinking: he found 200,000 of the 850,000 missing bitcoins. Yes, but also, by that time the price of a single bitcoin had sky-rocketed. This meant that the 200,000 re-discovered bitcoins were worth ~10x more than lost bitcoins. Now what?