MtGox

 Plaintiffs in two class-action suits charging the embattled Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox with fraud have agreed to a settlement, and new plans to revive the exchange have been drafted.

Earlier this year a class-action suit in Illinois was filed against Mt. Gox, following reports revealing the theft of some 850,000 bitcoins -- worth hundreds of millions of dollars -- due to a hacking attack. The exchange subsequently filed for liquidation with a Japanese court.

In June 2011, when customers of now-bankrupt bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox agitated for proof that the Tokyo-based firm was still solvent after a hacking attack, CEO Mark Karpeles turned to the comedy science fiction novel "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy".

In Bitcoin, transaction malleability describes the fact that the signatures that prove the ownership of bitcoins being transferred in a transaction do not provide any integrity guarantee for the signatures themselves.

Mt. Gox may have collected a large sum in trading fees in the weeks before its closure, even though it was already aware that a vast number of bitcoins had gone missing, its U.S. bankruptcy filing suggests.

A sworn declaration in the filing from Robert Karpeles, Mt. Gox ‘s CEO, reveals that the Bitcoin exchange knew in early February that its situation was far graver than it had disclosed at the time.

Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles lied when he said that the former world's biggest Bitcoin exchange – which filed for bankruptcy protection in the U.S. on Sunday and in Japan on Feb. 28 – had been relieved of 850,000 Bitcoins by hackers, according to the alleged hackers themselves.

“We stole no bitcoins,” the alleged miscreants wrote on Karpeles' hacked and defaced blog on Sunday, which was posted on Pastebin not long after. “There were none to steal.”

Following the MtGox Bitcoin exchange losing millions to a hack and filing for bankruptcy, anonymous attackers took over the personal blog and reddit account of MtGox CEO Mark Karpeles on Sunday. After seizing control, the hackers posted (Pastebin) a message to the two spaces detailing their findings and the reasoning behind the attack.

Mt. Gox, the Japan-based Bitcoin exchange, has had a remarkably bad month. All withdrawals from the service were halted on February 7, 2014; the CEO, Mark Karpeles, resigned from the board of the Bitcoin Foundation on February 23, 2014; and there was an indefinite closure of all transactions "for the time being" as of two days later. There has been a slow unraveling of the digital currency's valuation since February 1, 2014, though it has been on the mend at the time of writing.