Former Mt. Gox CEO Heads to Trial in Japan Over Missing Bitcoins
This article feels wanting.  It doesn&#x27;t cover much of any details about Mt. Gox and instead goes off on tangents about the former CEO&#x27;s personal life, and the cryptocurrency ecosystem...<p>I&#x27;ll see if I can make up the gap.  I&#x27;m no expert on the Mt. Gox story; it&#x27;s extensive and full of speculation, but here&#x27;s what I remember.<p>Mt. Gox has suffered multiple bugs, hacks, etc during its existence.  But the two significant events occurred in 2011 and 2014.<p>2011, the price peaked at something like $30 and quickly collapsed to $0.01.  As explained by Mt. Gox, this was due to a hacker breaking into the exchange and stealing a large amount of funds.  The drop to $0.01 was caused by the hacker selling a bunch of those coins on the exchange, eating through all the orders on the book.<p>Fast forward; February 2014 started off with Mt. Gox shockingly halting all Bitcoin withdrawals.  This was followed through the month with a number of disconcerting moves, from Karpeles leaving the Bitcoin Foundation to the closing of Twitter accounts.  Little information was released by Mt. Gox officially during this time.  At the end of February Mt. Gox filled for bankruptcy, claiming they had lost 750,000 Bitcoins (worth nearly $2 billion at today&#x27;s valuation).  Mt. Gox announced that they believed the coins were most likely stolen by hackers.<p>So what&#x27;s the story here?  Through the events of 2014 Mt. Gox was not the least bit transparent.  Halting Bitcoin withdrawals, and then a month later announcing bankruptcy and that coins had been stolen without any information in between was very disconcerting.  In addition, prior to 2014, they had halted USD withdrawals and had run into other banking difficulties in the interim.<p>The most damning evidence was released by a Tokyo security company WizSec, which concluded that &quot;most or all of the missing bitcoins were stolen straight out of the Mt. Gox hot wallet over time, beginning in late 2011.&quot;<p>If true, it meant Mt. Gox had been losing money for years.  People reasonably didn&#x27;t believe Mt. Gox could not have known about this.<p>The prevailing theory now is that at some point, likely early 2013 or sooner, Karpeles found out they had been bleeding coins.  Karpeles would have then been faced with having to announce the loss of a significant percentage of customer funds.  It would be the death knell for Mt. Gox.  Karpeles would lose his business, and customers would suffer.<p>Was there an alternative?  Maybe.  What if, instead, they kept quiet.  And what if they used their dominate position in the Bitcoin trading ecosystem to manipulate the market?  Slowly, casually manipulate the price of Bitcoin upward.  A rising price would compel investors to invest more, and sell less.  That would mean more deposits coming into Mt. Gox, and less withdrawals going out.<p>Basically, Mt. Gox would be operating with fractional reserves.   As long as there wasn&#x27;t a &quot;run on the bank&quot;, they could continue to operate without anyone knowing what happened.  In fact, if they could keep this going long enough, the lost funds could be made up slowly using fees and personal funds.<p>So the prevailing theory is that Karpeles realized and executed this plan.  Exactly when this would have occurred is up for speculation.<p>Obviously, things didn&#x27;t go as planned.  June 2013, Mt. Gox had to suspend USD withdrawals.  This had a really nasty side effect.  Basically, to get your money out of the exchange now, you had to buy BTC and then withdrawal those coins to sell on a different exchange with functioning USD withdrawals.<p>The result is a rapidly rising price, because of increased buy pressure.<p>The end of 2013 sees the price of Bitcoin rapidly rise 500%.  As with most rapid explosions in price, we saw a correction shortly after.<p>By the end of January 2014 the price had fallen ~30%.<p>If our suspicions are true regarding Mt. Gox, this would be fatal.  Lots of investors making 500% returns in the span of two months, and then seeing a market correction downward?  You bet they&#x27;re gonna sell and pull out.  A run on the bank.<p>So February 2014, they had to halt BTC withdrawals, and the sham was up.  The rest is history in the making.<p>This court case will be terribly interesting.  Will any of this theory be proven true?  Other theories abound.  Some argue the coins were merely stolen by an insider, or a company Mt. Gox was working with.  Some argue they were stolen by Karpeles himself.  Hopefully some kind of compelling evidence one way or the other will come to light during the course of the trial.<p>Regardless, this case is making history for Bitcoin exchanges.  It will certainly be a story that puts fiction to shame.