From Protest to Provenance: Mt. Gox Protest Sign Becomes Auction Item Eleven Years Later
What started as a desperate protest in the winter of 2014 is now a rare piece of cryptocurrency history—one that you can now own, for the right price.
The handwritten cardboard sign that Kolin Burges famously held outside Mt. Gox’s Tokyo office is up for auction on Scarce.City, with a reserve price set at 4.5 BTC (roughly $383,000). The auction kicks off Friday and runs through April 3.
Back then, Burges was just one of many bitcoin users whose funds had vanished without explanation. He flew from London to Tokyo on instinct, hoping to confront Mt. Gox’s CEO, Mark Karpeles, and demand answers.
“I didn’t think the sign would matter,” Burges said in a recent interview with CoinDesk. “It was just something to make sure people knew what was happening.”
And they did. Photos of Burges holding the sign—“Mt. Gox, Where Is Our Money?”—spread rapidly. His quiet act of defiance became the face of a crisis that would expose massive mismanagement, lost funds, and the collapse of what had been the world’s biggest bitcoin exchange.
Behind the scenes, Burges recalled the tension building.
“There was a moment when a Mt. Gox employee tried to pay for drinks with a company card, and it got declined,” he said. “That was when it hit me—the structure was failing in real time.”
Mt. Gox officially filed for bankruptcy days after Burges’ protest began. Karpeles was eventually acquitted of embezzlement but convicted of data manipulation, receiving a suspended sentence in 2021. He has since returned to the industry with new ventures, including a trading platform and a crypto ratings firm.
As for the sign, Burges kept it quietly for years. Now, with crypto’s evolution into a global financial force, he sees its value as more than symbolic.
“It’s part of the story now,” he said. “A piece of history that reminds us where we came from—and how far we still have to go.”
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