YOU HAVE BEEN
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Tremendous incompetence or out-and-out fraud? Nathaniel Mott at Pando Daily presents evidence that makes the former explanation a bit harder to believe.
Mt. Gox lost most of its Bitcoin years before it shut down in 2014
A report claims that most of Mt. Gox’s bitcoins disappeared long before the beleaguered exchange shut down in 2014 and was embroiled in controversy.
Mt. Gox shut down after it neared bankruptcy, allegedly lost almost $365 million worth of Bitcoin, and its chief executive used the exchange’s funds to pay for his rent, a 3-D printer, a robot, and a racing version of the Honda Civic.
As WizSec, the self-proclaimed Bitcoin security specialists investigating Mt. Gox’s shutdown, said in an executive summary of their most recent findings:
Most or all of the missing bitcoins were stolen straight out of the MtGox hot wallet over time, beginning in late 2011. As a result, MtGox operated at fractional reserve for years (knowingly or not), and was practically depleted of bitcoins by 2013. A significant number of stolen bitcoins were deposited onto various exchanges, including MtGox itself, and probably sold for cash (which at the bitcoin prices of the day would have been substantially less than the hundreds of millions of dollars they were worth at the time of MtGox’s collapse).
The claim that Mt. Gox was operating at a fractional reserve lends support to earlier reports that the exchange’s bitcoins were stolen as part of an inside job. As Pando wrote when Japanese authorities first made that claim in January…
Keep reading Mt. Gox lost most of its Bitcoin years before it shut down in 2014 | PandoDaily.
