On February 28, 2014, Mt. Gox applied for civil rehabilitation at the Tokyo District Court. In its announcement, the company said roughly 750,000 customer BTC and 100,000 of its own BTC had disappeared. These were preliminary company figures, not a final forensic accounting. Read the filing announcement.
What the contemporary notice says
The notice reports that the website closed at noon on February 25, Japan time. It describes discrepancies in both bitcoin and cash balances and says the causes and amounts were still being investigated. Its initial explanation should be treated as the company’s account at that time, not as a settled technical conclusion. February 28 statement.
The estimate changed
On March 20, Mt. Gox announced that it had located approximately 200,000 BTC in an older wallet. It revised the estimated missing amount to approximately 650,000 BTC, again warning that the investigation could change the numbers. Read the wallet announcement.
An exchange balance is a claim on a business
When a company holds the keys, its customer’s balance is a claim against that company. A functioning Bitcoin network does not guarantee that the company is solvent or that it holds all the coins reflected in its database. Self-custody removes that particular intermediary but introduces responsibility for key security and backups. Bitcoin.org’s custody and security guidance describes those trade-offs.
Follow the official record
The rehabilitation trustee maintains a document archive. Repayment procedures and deadlines can change; this historical article is not guidance for making a claim. The archive is the appropriate starting point for those updates.