During the early "Crypto" days, one of the most popular exchanges to trade bitcoin was Mt. Gox. But the famous exchange was hacked in February 2014, resulting in the loss of around 850,000 bitcoin (around $460 million at that time). The company had previously moved to Japan Mark under the leadership of Mark Karpeles, but following the incident, it filed bankruptcy and went defunct shortly after.
However, as a ray of hope, the exchange was able to recover some of the bitcoins that it lost, which would be used to reimburse the users. The baton was passed on to one Mr. Nobuaki Kobayashi, a bankruptcy trustee who was given the task of liquidating cryptocurrencies and repay all victims of the hack. CoinDesk recently reported that he had sold around $400 Million in Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. The interesting thing is that he now holds around 166,000 BTC that are worth approximately $1.7 Billion.
So the real question now is whether the entity should repay the users the same amount of Bitcoins they lost or the USD equivalent of the BTC at the time of the incident. The Trustee's viewpoint seems to be inclined to the former. However, most of the victims seem to be outraged at this decision as the Bitcoin prices have risen incredibly since the hack (around 20x). They say they simply want their BTC back.
Not a legal expert but I'm of the opinion that in the event of reimbursement, everyone should be given the same number of bitcoins that they lost, not some FIAT equivalent based on a conversion rate. That would be the fair thing to do, IMHO.
What do you guys think?
NB: Some interesting discussions are going in popular crypto related subreddits like r/cryptocurrency and r/bitcoin
