A documented history from the transcript archive

GoxedMt. Gox, Mark Karpelès, and what the shows were saying while it happened

Nine searchable shows mention Mt. Gox in 821 broadcasts between June 2011 and September 2026. They were covering the withdrawal freeze within four days, read the leaked crisis document on air the morning after it leaked, watched the price chart stop moving in real time, and were still arguing about the man three months ago. This is that record — including the calls the shows got wrong, which are the reason it is worth keeping.

Built from 31,487,386 words of local episode transcripts across nine shows (WCN · Mad Bitcoins · The Bitcoin Group · Today in Bitcoin · Bitcoin Talk Show · Brother John F · Ugly Old Goat · SF Bitcoin Meetup · Money & Tech, 2011–2026) · 821 broadcasts mention the exchange, 193 mention the man · 40 quotes, each verified verbatim against raw_text · Compiled 2026-10-16 · v1.0

01What this report can and cannot claim

The spelling problem, and why it is worse here than anywhere else in the archive

The transcripts are Whisper output, mostly from whisper-base, the smallest model in the family. It mangles proper nouns, and the archive maintains an alias list for that. Mt. Gox was already on it. Mark Karpelès was not, and the reason is that he is invisible.

Probing the exchange itself produced a second, larger correction. The alias group held four spellings. The audio also pushes Gox into a hard-C family the group did not contain — gocks (209), gawks (137), gocs (73) and mount cox (38):

Bare gawks is the one judgement call, because it is also an English verb. It was audited across all 310 occurrences in 137 broadcasts: 235 are directly prefixed by mt/mount/mout/mouth, and every remaining preceder sampled — “the gawks thing”, “on gawks”, “that gawks” — is the exchange. Not one instance of the English verb was found. Bare gox (871) and goxed (19) were deliberately not added: the first is a strict superset that would widen the group past the point where its own counts mean anything, and the second is a derived verb rather than a spelling.

Attribution

Transcripts carry no speaker labels. Tiers follow the house convention: A for a forward-pointing cue (a hand-off this quote answers, self-identification in the passage, or a single-voice programme), A− for a backward-pointing one, B where the roster is known from the show’s own cold open but which person spoke is not established. Nothing is named at tier B. Writing style, known opinions and subject-matter expertise are not used as attribution signals, and that matters more than usual in a report about a living man convicted of one thing and acquitted of another.

Where a quote’s meaning depends on a word Whisper may have mangled, the quote carries a red bar saying so. There are seven of those and they are not decoration — one of them is a price.

02The shape of the coverage

Nine shows, 821 broadcasts, fifteen years. The order of the rows is the order of first mention, which is mostly an artefact of when each show started; the broadcast counts are the more interesting column.

By year, across the whole indexed corpus, the story has two peaks and never dies:

The 2018 peak is worth pausing on, because it is not what anyone would predict. More broadcasts mention Mt. Gox in 2018 — four years after the exchange died — than in any year except 2014 itself. The exchange stopped existing and the story did not.

03Before the fall: 2011–2013

The earliest Mt. Gox material in this archive is only findable as mount gox. On the canonical spelling it does not exist. It is Brother John F’s Volume 1, 14 June 2011, and the honest thing to say about it is that it is not a scoop:

That is a man explaining where you buy bitcoin. It is the first mention in the archive and it carries no warning in it at all, which is the point: in June 2011 Mt. Gox was simply where bitcoin happened. This is the one claim in this report that is not provisional — nothing held and untranscribed reaches back past 2013, so no unindexed show can beat it.

Five days later the exchange was hacked and the price printed one cent. Volume 10, on 21 June, is live commentary on the rollback read off a TradeHill order book. By 28 May 2013 Mad Bitcoins was running the history as a segment, and it is a nice demonstration that the transcriber’s mangling is not random — it mangles the thing the segment is about:

Two weeks earlier, on 16 May 2013, Brother John F had covered the Department of Homeland Security seizure of Mt. Gox’s US accounts in Volume 49, “DHS versus GOX”, reading the warrant on air. That is the earliest Karpelès mention in the archive — and it arrives as Carpellas, inside a quoted legal document about Wells Fargo.

04The early warning: 11 February 2014

This is the interesting question, and the archive has a clean answer to it. Mt. Gox halted bitcoin withdrawals on 7 February 2014 and blamed transaction malleability, a protocol quirk. The community largely accepted that explanation for weeks.

Four days later, on 11 February, Brother John F published Volume 80, titled “Goodbye Gox”. He opens on the fact that would turn out to matter most — the Gox premium had inverted:

He then replays his own June 2011 report on the first Gox crash — “just so you can see that this is not a new thing” — and closes with a read of the situation that is, with hindsight, close to exactly right, two weeks before the halt and seventeen days before the bankruptcy filing:

Set against it, the same week, is Mad Bitcoins taking the company at its word. On 14 February, after Gox announced a fix:

Eleven days later there was no solution. It is worth keeping both on the page: one show read the spread and called insolvency, another read the press release and called it great news, and the second was the normal response.

05The collapse, day by day

In the ten weeks from 25 January to 5 April 2014 the indexed corpus holds 63 broadcasts that mention the exchange. Mad Bitcoins was broadcasting more than once a day and titling episodes with the live price. The titles alone narrate it:

24 February — the resignation and the spread

24 Feb 2014 — two prices, one coinThe broadcast reads the resignation story live. The browser tabs above it show the divergence that ended the exchange: 191.13002 Mt.Gox BTC alongside $579.34 Bitstamp BTC. Frame at 00:08 from the local archive copy, MB_20140224_hJ76k7KRu4k.mp4. The article and photograph on screen are third-party material shown as broadcast.

25 Feb 2014 — the chart that stopped“this live chart is not moving.” The ticker reads Mt.Gox: 135 and the adjacent tab is still trying to load mtgox.com. The on-screen clock reads Mon Feb 24, 8:46 PM local — the show is filed under the 25th. Frame at 00:14 from the local archive copy, MB_20140225_sqSLT1ywknM.mp4.

25–26 February — reading the leaked document on air

A twelve-page document headed Crisis Strategy Draft leaked on 24 February and was widely reported on the 25th. It contained the figure that became the number everyone remembers. The archive holds that figure spoken on air twice, on consecutive days — and neither show simply repeated it.

The following day World Crypto Network ran a four-and-a-half-hour live panel on it. The difference in register is the difference between a daily and a panel show: WCN spends its time on whether the document is real.

Who was in the roomThe Hangout lower-third names the on-screen tile. The transcript does not name anybody at all. Frame at 12:25 from the local archive copy, WCN_20140226_1mWkY5yIAnc.mp4. Shown as roster evidence; it is not used to attribute any quote.

And who elseThe second named participant on the same broadcast. Frame at 2:19:24 from the local archive copy, WCN_20140226_1mWkY5yIAnc.mp4.

And then, buried two hours into a live stream, a prediction that took seventeen months to come true:

28 February — bankruptcy, and a question nobody could answer

10 March — the database goes on sale

10 March 2014 — read out live from the forumThe broadcast puts the actual bitcointalk thread on screen and reads the advertisement word for word. The on-screen clock says Mon Mar 10, 1:50 PM; the transcript opens “Today is Monday, March 10th, at 149 pm.” The episode corroborates its own date, which is the check that matters for a row dated from its upload. Frame at 00:32 from the local archive copy, WCN_20140310_A9Pyvq9d3b4.mp4. The forum page is third-party material shown as broadcast.

06Karpelès: alleged, charged, convicted, acquitted

The archive tracks the case closely. Money & Tech covered the admission two weeks after the arrest, and is careful to keep the admission and the denial in the same breath:

Two years later, as the trial opened, Today in Bitcoin states the charge precisely and then says the thing most coverage would not:

15 March 2019 — the verdict

The Bitcoin Group #195The panel reads the verdict off Bloomberg, the day after it was handed down. The sub-headline on screen — Japan court found Karpeles guilty of tampering with records — is what the show then relays accurately. Frame at 00:44 from the local archive copy, WCN_20190315_2JtehMX9pJw.mp4. The Bloomberg page is third-party material shown as broadcast.

This is the episode where precision matters, and the show gets it right:

The four rows above are from secondary reporting, not the archive — see Outside the archive. The archive’s own account of the verdict is the two quotes above it.

Did he ever speak to these shows? Yes — and that episode is the hole in this report

The panel goes on to note that he “denied that the trade bots had an effect” and that he “does wish to make himself available to attempt to explain the hacking situation, and perhaps will do a proper interview on the Mad Bittcoins program soon.”

How the shows characterised him

The register is consistently contempt-without-accusation, which is a narrower line than it sounds. Over twelve years he is “the Baron of Bitcoin”; he is, on the verdict episode, the man who “bought the website and then for whatever reason he kept the domain name” (TBG #195, 2019-03-15 — an unattributed panel turn, tier B); and in a 2022 episode about Sam Bankman-Fried he becomes the benchmark for competence rather than honesty:

And in July 2026, the most recent Karpelès mention in the archive, the tone has settled into exhaustion:

07After: the trustee, the creditors, the repayments

The bankruptcy was converted to civil rehabilitation in 2018, which is what made repayment in bitcoin possible rather than in yen at 2014 prices. The archive registers this as its second peak: 124 broadcasts mention the exchange in 2018, more than any year but 2014. civil rehabilitation appears in 14 broadcasts, trustee in 70, kobayashi in 21, creditors in 117.

Repayments began in July 2024. The Bitcoin Group covered it the week it started, under the title “Finally Goxed”:

The Bitcoin Group #415, 6 July 2024Ten years and four months after the bankruptcy filing, the creditors start being paid — and the market reads it as a supply shock. The Zoom tile names the speaker. Frame at 01:10 from the local archive copy, WCN_20240706_C776Dhu5R7o.mp4. The Reuters page is third-party material shown as broadcast.

Two months later the show covered his return to the industry:

The Bitcoin Group #421, 7 September 2024The exchange is called EllipX; the ratings venture is called Ungox. The transcript renders the second as “Un-Gawks”, which is the same error that hid a fifth of this story. Frame at 20:28 from the local archive copy, WCN_20240907_uPK__NzNzWs.mp4. The article on screen is third-party material shown as broadcast.

The most recent substantive item in the archive is from March 2026:

One gap worth naming. goxdox returns zero across 31,487,386 words, as does gox docs. GoxDox is the creditor-advocacy site that published the leaked trustee bank records in 2019 alleging roughly $312m of Mt. Gox crypto was sold through BitPoint — a significant episode in the creditor story. These shows never mentioned it. That is a real absence in the coverage, not a search failure: it was probed against the full alias machinery and both spellings return nothing.

08What the shows got right, and what they got wrong

This is the part only the archive can supply, and a version of it containing only the good calls would be advertising. Both columns are below.

Both lists below are judgements about the indexed corpus only, and the first item in each is in substance a priority claim. The coverage caveat in section 01 applies to this section in full — Let’s Talk Bitcoin, Epicenter and the LTB Network were all broadcasting through February 2014 and none of them is transcribed.

Right

1. 2014-02-11 · Brother John FCalled insolvency, not malleability. Two weeks before the halt, reasoning from the inverted price spread rather than from the company’s statements. The first half of that reading — a long-running undetected theft, and insolvency rather than a protocol glitch — is what the later record describes. The second half, that management then traded on the premium to cover the hole, is his inference and remains one: it is adjacent to the conduct he was acquitted of, and no court has found it.
2. 2014-02-11 · Brother John F“this is not any flaw in Bitcoin this is a flaw in an exchange.” Said while the mainstream framing was that Bitcoin itself had failed. It is the line every show in this archive is heard holding, and it was the right one — though “every show” here is an impression from reading the material, not a query result.
3. 2014-02-25 · Mad BitcoinsPicked the right line out of the leaked document. Not the 744,408 headline but “the cold storage has been wiped out due to a leak in the hot wallet. This is the key line.” That is the mechanism, and he picked it out of a twelve-page document within hours of its leaking. Selecting the right line is not the same as finding it, and he is reading, not investigating.
4. 2014-02-26 · WCN panelDid not take the leaked document at face value. Four and a half hours spent on whether it was authentic, who verified it, and what Gox itself said about it. Much of the coverage that week treated the figure as established. This broadcast treated it as a claim — as, to its credit, did Mad Bitcoins the day before.
5. 2019-03-15 · The Bitcoin GroupReported the verdict correctly. Convicted of records tampering, suspended sentence, and — the part most coverage still gets wrong — that this “essentially clears Carpellis of responsibility for the missing coins”. The acquittal, conveyed accurately without being named.

Wrong

1. 2014-02-26 · Brother John FThe price call, and it is a big one. In Volume 82 (Empty Gox), fifteen days after the correct insolvency call, the same presenter — tier A throughout, because Brother John F is a single-voice programme — projected a near-tripling: “we're probably going to do a similar run right now from roughly where we are to at least a thousand and really if we do that threefold move we could actually go into new highs and go to 1500” — because the market had been “relieved of the curse of Mt. Gox”. Bitcoin did not go to $1,000. It fell through the rest of 2014 to roughly $300 by December. The same show, the same analyst, two weeks apart: one of the best calls in the archive and one of the worst.
2. 2014-02-14 · Mad BitcoinsTook the “solution” announcement at face value. “That's great news.” There was no solution; the exchange was ten days from suspending trading. To his credit he hedged in the same breath and disclosed his own panic-selling on air, which is more than most.
3. 2019-03-15 · The Bitcoin GroupA figure that does not stand up. “More than 850,000 bitcoins went missing after the Mt. Gox collapse, with only 60,000 remaining to be distributed by the bankruptcy courts.” (TBG #195 — the host’s issue read, tier A, same card as the verdict quote above.) The 850,000 is the standard figure. The 60,000 is not: the estate’s recovered holdings are consistently reported at around 142,000 BTC, and had been public for years by March 2019. Flagged rather than asserted: this is a whisper-base transcript and a spoken number is exactly what it mangles — see the $566-as-$5.66 case in section 04. Either the show was wrong or the transcript is. The episode would have to be listened to in order to tell, and that has not been done.
4. 2014–2026 · all showsNobody predicted how long it would take. The 28 February 2014 broadcast expects the money to be “split up amongst the customers”. No broadcast in the archive anticipates that creditors would wait ten years and four months for a first payment, or that the process would still be open twelve years on. This is not a failure of analysis so much as a failure of imagination, and it is universal in the record.
5. The archive as a wholeThe GoxDox blind spot. Zero mentions, in either spelling, across 31 million words. The leaked trustee bank records and the creditor-advocacy campaign around them are simply absent from this coverage.

09What could not be established

10Reproducing this

Every figure above comes from the query layer, not from hand-rolled SQL:

Two edits were made to aliases.json while building this, both backed up and both re-audited against the union ≤ sum(seen) rule — all 32 groups pass. The Mt. Gox group went from 4 spellings to 12; a Mark Karpelès group with 21 spellings was created where none existed. Anything published from this archive about Mt. Gox before 16 October 2026 undercounts by about 21%.

Rights. Brother John F is rights: unknown and quotable only by Thomas’s editorial decision of 15 October 2026; its media may not be served, which is why the two Brother John F episodes carrying the best early-warning material in this report appear as quotes and links with no screenshot. Money & Tech is mixed for the same reason. The eight images are two from Mad Bitcoins, three from World Crypto Network and three from The Bitcoin Group — all three shows own, may_serve_media: true. The local files for the Bitcoin Group frames are named WCN_… because that show is broadcast on the WCN channel; the show, not the channel, is what the rights attach to.

11Sources