Effortless French: Mt. Gox and Bitcoin’s roller coaster ride

After watching the riveting and entertaining nearly two-hour film documentary Effortless French, about the rise and fall of Mt. Gox, the infamous bitcoin exchange, there are two questions (one big, one small) that are never fully answered. (Full disclosure: I was interviewed for this film and appear in multiple scenes, but I did not see any rough cut or portion of the film until I was recently sent a screener.)

First, we still don't have a complete understanding of exactly what happened at Mt. Gox. We probably never will. It's clear that the exchange's Tokyo-based now-ex-CEO Mark Karpelès doesn't really seem to know what happened either. Nor, for that matter, does he seem to be emotionally affected by it in any way that was captured on film.

Launched as a bitcoin exchange in 2010, Mt. Gox quickly became the world's most popular place to trade. But by February 2014, the site pulled the plug and filed for bankruptcy. Mt. Gox blamed its huge losses on hackers who had pilfered 850,000 bitcoins (now worth over $8 billion), taking advantage of a major security flaw. At the time, Karpelès became the most hated person in the bitcoin world for letting it happen right under his nose.

As for my second question: the filmmakers never directly address the question of the title of the film, which is derived from the T-shirt that Karpelès bizarrely wore the day in 2015 that he was arrested in Tokyo. He also agreed to wear that same T-shirt during the entire time that he sat for interviews for the film. If the French filmmakers, Vincent Gonon and Xavier Sayanoff, ever asked him about the T-shirt, the scene never made the final cut of the film.

Normally, the English word "effortless" implies making something difficult look easy. But here, Gonon and Sayanoff, who are both fluent in the language, seem to suggest a different and more literal meaning of the word: that there was a lack of meaningful effort on the part of this one Frenchman.

As for speculator bitcoiners who lost their money in the crash—too bad. That's the price of gambling in the digital Wild West. Yes, Mt. Gox's bankruptcy proceedings remain ongoing (see: mtgoxlegal.com), but no one knows what, if any, money will be recovered to its creditors, even though the bitcoins are now worth a lot more than they were at the time.

By the end of Effortless French, Karpelès' quiet and naïve humanity shines through—he admits it's "well possible" that he has Asperger's or is on the spectrum somehow. There's an extended sequence in the final scene where he discloses that he has spent years mimicking the social cues of others. In short, I was left with the impression that Karpelès got way in over his head and oversaw the collapse of his company, but probably will come out more or less OK.

Flying high

The film opens with Karpelès' arrest on August 1, 2015—this is depicted in the film through a montage of news footage. (He was eventually released on bail in July 2016.) Within the first minute, there's also footage of Karpelès in 2007 (well prior to his involvement in Mt. Gox) saying to the camera that he wants to "take over the world," but he admits that he's "probably not the only one."

Then, we dive into bitcoin's origin story, as told primarily by Jeffrey Tucker, a libertarian economist (and bitcoin evangelist), The New York Times' Nathaniel Popper, and Roger Ver (aka "Bitcoin Jesus").

At about minute 15 of Effortless French, Karpelès himself is finally interviewed. Frankly, I was a bit surprised that he even agreed to appear, given that his legal case is still ongoing in Japan. For nearly the entire film, he appears seated at a wooden table in a strange space that looks like a cross between a cave and an interrogation room. At first, he briefly speaks in Japanese before switching to his native French. Karpelès then explains that, when he took over Mt. Gox in 2011, it only had about 2,000 to 3,000 customers, but that number skyrocketed to about a million within two years.

Astonishingly, Karpelès says that Mt. Gox wasn't meant at all as a bank or a proto-Coinbase. Rather, it was simply a way for people to buy bitcoins using bank transfers and then withdraw them. He didn't intend for people to keep their bitcoins there for any meaningful period of time, despite the fact that that's exactly what people did.

The rise of Mt. Gox was in parallel to the rise of Silk Road, the underground (and also now-defunct) drug website. Karpelès admits that Mt. Gox "indirectly" benefited from Silk Road before casually noting that "a third to a half of transactions on Mt. Gox were linked to Silk Road." Then his interview immediately cuts to a separate and direct shot of him, with an almost blank stare on his face, looking right at the camera, shrugging his shoulders.

Through coworkers, the Mt. Gox of that era is described as a place that grew fast but was only meaningfully controlled by one person. Karpelès himself apparently never told anyone about the company's financial state. He doesn't appear to have ever had any allies, trusted friends, or confidantes. He seems to have entirely spurned his wife and son. Even his mother, Anne Karpelès, says in the film that she and her son mostly communicated through "cat pictures."

In a moment that almost reads as heartfelt, Karpelès admits to the filmmakers that managing people "is not easy" and says that managing humans is "much more complicated" than managing servers. (Mt. Gox was 88 percent owned by Karpelès' other company, Tibanne—a hosting company, which is also in bankruptcy, named for his cat.) But again, this moment passes without any further selfreflection and little emotion.

In a recent interview with the BBC, by comparison, Karpelès is a bit more articulate.

"It felt like... when you fall from a building and you see the ground getting closer, and you feel like you are about to die," he said. "Mt. Gox went from an interesting project to being, I would say, a daily nightmare of dealing with banks, governments, people I never knew existed."

One of the most bizarre pieces of archival footage dated a few months after Mt. Gox's bankruptcy in early 2014 is a YouTube video of Karpelès speaking Japanese and teaching viewers how to make a French tarte aux pommes (apple tart). This footage is an example of the behavior that those who lost money on Mt. Gox found infuriating. Karpelès seemed indifferent to the plight of those who had lost money because of him.

On borrowed wings

About three-quarters of the way through the film, a picture starts to emerge as to what actually happened. Jed McCaleb, the original American founder of Mt. Gox, sold Karpelès a website with a built-in flaw—a flaw that seemed manageable but eventually became crippling.

According to reporting by Jake Adelstein (an American reporter with The Daily Beast who has been based in Japan for decades and who speaks fluent Japanese), Mt. Gox was already 80,000 BTC in the hole by the time Karpelès bought it in 2011. Someone had already attacked the site and had spirited away a sizable amount. (Adelstein wrote a September 2017 Kindle Single, Pay the Devil in Bitcoin, on the Mt. Gox story.)

Karpelès, not being the most scrupulous of buyers, went ahead with the deal anyway. He was instructed by McCaleb not to tell anyone that there was a behind-the-scenes bot (dubbed "Willy Bot" by some bitcoin observers). The bot was quietly making trades as a way to offset this debt. The only problem was, as the price of bitcoin rose, the debt was effectively growing higher and higher—Karpelès had to buy more bitcoins in fiat currency. Mt. Gox, after all, was being treated like a bank, but it was not fully solvent.

On top of it all, Mt. Gox was being robbed blind without anyone even realizing it.

In the film, Adelstein makes a point of saying that McCaleb never responded to his inquiries, which is strange, as McCaleb has both spoken with Ars numerous times and also appears in Effortless French.

"He totally screwed it up," McCaleb says of Karpelès.

In the end, through some blockchain analysis (outlined in further detail in the film), it's likely that BTC-e—a sketchy Russia-based bitcoin exchange that did not require any details about who opened accounts—was behind the heist.

In July 2017, Russian national Alexander Vinnik was arrested in Greece on criminal charges of money laundering in the United States. Prosecutors accused him of being an owner and operator of BTC-e. American authorities are still attempting to extradite him from Greece to face charges in federal court in San Francisco.

Now what?

After watching the film on Friday, I asked the filmmakers by email why the T-shirt is never mentioned. Sayanoff wrote that they ended up interviewing Karpelès over three full days, for 13 hours in total. (The filmmakers wrote in French, and the English translations of their messages as below are my own.)

"So yes, we asked him," Sayanoff wrote. "We chose not to put it in the documentary, as the response in the end was not very interesting, and we couldn't find a place for it in a very tight story. In essence, his choice of the T-shirt and the cap were unconscious."

Also, I asked about whether Willy Bot was ultimately successful in covering the loss of 80,000 bitcoins. They said that yes, it was.

"But Mark [Karpelès] continued to run Willy Bot," Sayanoff continued. "Mark always was evasive on this delicate subject, because for him it touches directly on the trial."

I also asked what Karpelès is up to now, which the film doesn't address.

"Small jobs, apparently," they continued. "There is still a network of people who trust in him and who he works for. Mark is still an excellent coder. I don't doubt for an instant that in a short time he'll start a new company. I just hope for his sake that this time he surrounds himself with capable people to run the business in his place."

Finally, I asked if they had felt that Karpelès was remorseful for his failures, as, I wrote to them, "if so, he doesn't really show it, outside of Japanese formalities."

"This is the most complicated for Mark," Sayanoff wrote. "I don't doubt for a moment that he regrets some of his choices and is conscious of his responsibilities. After that, like a child, he's incapable of admitting them. There will always be a 'but.' However, he does it at the end of the documentary when he talks about failure and questioning. Afterward, to say whether it's enough, sincere or not... personally, I think so. I think it's just his way of saying that he screwed up."

So where does that leave us?

Ars also contacted Karpelès via his very active Reddit account, where he also recently responded to a query from the podcast Reply All. We asked if he'd seen Effortless French.

His response, sent on Saturday morning, Tokyo time:

Hi,

Yes, I saw it. A lot of people came to me with positive feedback so that's good. I feel the ending is kind of inconclusive, but that's probably because this whole case isn't [sic] ended yet.

M.

The film's final title sequence says Karpelès' ongoing embezzlement trial will likely last years.

For now, Effortless French is only available on Canal+, a French cable channel. Gonon and Sayanoff are currently seeking a foreign distributor.