Charlie Shrem: ‘Mark Karpeles Wanted to Take the Weekend Off’ After Mt. Gox Collapsed

Charlie Shrem accuses Mark Karpeles of not having cared about Mt. Gox’s users, and calls the former digital currency exchange a ponzi scheme.
Bitcoin entrepreneur Charlie Shrem, has spoken out about his experiences dealing with Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles. Taking part in a Google hangout for the Toronto Decentral Bitcoin Meetup Group, Shrem was asked toexplain his relationship with Karpeles, who ran what was once the world’s largest digital currency exchange.
Shrem, who was a co-founder of the Bitcoin Foundation, describes difficult and labored exchanges with Karpeles during Shrem’s time as BitInstant CEO. At the time, Shrem was attempting to make the two services work together through their public APIs. Remembering the period when Mt. Gox had been taken offline by denial of service attacks, Shrem recounts Karpeles’ reaction to the issue:
‘Remember like Mt Gox went down the first time and it was like, a Friday, and Roger and Jessie were like helping him out and Roger’s like to Mark ‘what time do you want me come in tomorrow?’ like Saturday morning to help’
‘Mark’s like ‘no problem, we’ll deal with it on Monday’, and they’re like ‘you’re shut down, the customers think all of the money’s lost, you’ve been hacked, everyone’s flipping out, people have you know hits out on you, you want to go back to work on Monday? He just didn’t care about anything’.

This post was published at Coin Telegraph on 2015-01-27.