BITCOIN - THE GHOST OF MTGOX NEVER DIES
Bitcoin has came a long way from Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper 10 years ago.
It is now a template for an entire blockchain revolution. But it has been a bumpy ride, from its media perception as the 'Criminals Coin' to the 'Future of currency'. Based on 'Un-crackable' Encryption', it remains as secure today as it was in its inception. It remains at the number one spot it terms of Market Capitalisation.
However one event hangs over this digital currency, one event that has continued to drain the event of credibility, and increase is volatility. It remains a ticking time bomb in the entire crypto space.
I am of course talking about the 2014 MTGOX exchange fraud/theft in which 850,000 bitcoins went missing. The coins themselves were not hacked, but exchange they were stored on allowed them them to be taken. Many believe the exchange itself was involved in a massive fraud. Arrests were made in 2015, the exchange went into liquidation and most people lost their money.
Worth over $450 million at the time, but now worth around 7.5 billion. Many of these coins have since been recovered, and remain in ownership of the MTGOX trustee.
The market spiked to unprecidented levels at the end of 2017 and Bitcoin reached 20 thousand dollars. Around this time, the court allowed the MTGOX trustee to sell a considerable amount of coins to renburse creditors and pay legal bills. The entire market collapsed in January 2018, and many blame MTGOX for this. The Trustees however refute this effected the market
The problem is, that MTGOX have a lot more coins. The worry is that another large bitcoin dump could crash this young market again.
And it looks like MTGOX is raising its ugly head again. Bitcoins transparency allows anyone to very transactions on the blockchain. It appears that a large amount has been recently transfered to an exchange. The worry is, will this crash the market?.. and will bitcoin ever be able to remove the ghost of MTGOX?
A few things have changed since the last crash. Bitcoins dominance in the market has reduced considerably. Altcoins are increasingly looking like the future of the market. In the past few months the price of other coins has skyrocketed while bitcoin has started to stabilise.
It apears that 16,000 bitcoins are sitting on an exchange worth about 140million. It will be interesting to see if this relatively small dump can cause damage to the market. The hope is that, cryptocurrency has matured enough to take this.
However once again the ghost of MTGOX hangs over the industry.
Only time will tell.