For Desperate Mt Gox Victims, Long-Shot Bitcoin Deal Beats Endless Wait

Creditors of failed bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox are considering an offer by Russian law firm ZP Legal, which claimed it could recover up to 200,000 BTC from unnamed Russian nationals.

A Russian law firm's audacious proposal for recovering up to $2 billion stolen from Mt. Gox in return for a steep fee has divided the failed bitcoin exchange's creditors.

A minority of creditors have decided it's better to take a chance on Moscow-based ZP Legal than sit and wait for Nobuaki Kobayashi, Mt. Gox's court-appointed trustee in Japan, to finish the corporate restructuring process.

As CoinDesk previously reported, ZP Legal approached Mt. Gox Legal, an association representing the creditors, in February, via then-head of MGL Andy Pag.

Creditors would have to wait for alleged BTC-e operator Alexander Vinnik to get extradited to Russia and for the police to find the other culprits - with ZP Legal's help.

At the same time, according to a Telegram chat for Mt. Gox creditors, people are worried about what happens if some creditors choose to use both ZP Legal's service and the Japanese court's civil rehabilitation process, potentially ending up in a better situation than others.

Mt. Gox creditor Frank Lee told CoinDesk he found a Moscow-based lawyer named Ivan Bunik, of the law firm Timofeev, Farenvald and Partners, who agreed to look into the case.

Zheleznikov himself has acknowledged ZP Legal can't guarantee a successful recovery for the Mt. Gox creditors, that the firm will be operating in a legal grey zone and that the strategy might take years to bear fruit.

In the meantime, some of the creditors suspect that the whole operation ZP Legal is planning has a totally different objective: boosting the chances that Vinnik will be extradited to Russia instead of the U.S., by presenting more victims on the Russian side.

"The conclusion of Vinnik's extradition may be influenced by decision to take into consideration of how many victims and financial damages each country has," Mt. Gox creditor Lee wrote in a blog post.