Since the collapse last year of Mt. Gox, the exchange that served as the largest hub for storing and trading the virtual currency Bitcoin, law enforcement officials and angry clients have been asking what happened to nearly half a billion dollars in Bitcoins that the company said had vanished from its computer systems, the New York Times reported yesterday. On Saturday, the Japanese police arrested Mark Karpeles, the head of the exchange, which was based in Tokyo, on suspicion that he had used the popular online financial platform, which he developed, to illicitly add $1 million to an account under his control. But the arrest, and the small amount of information divulged by Japanese law enforcement officials, shed little light on the larger mystery of the missing Bitcoins.
