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The curse of Mt Gox: back from the dead

What caused the great crypto winter of 2018? Mt Gox going bankrupt in 2014. And now Mt Gox is back from the dead to take one final swipe at crypto in 2022

Harry Hamburg
Harry Hamburg
15 min read
The curse of Mt Gox: back from the dead
This is what Dall-E mini generated when I typed in "curse of Mount Gox". Pretty cool, isn't it?

Way back in the 2018 bear market, I wrote an article titled “the curse of Mt Gox”.

In it I explored how a crypto exchange getting hacked in 2014 was likely the single biggest contributor to the 2018 crypto winter.

The authorities had managed to recover some 200,000 stolen bitcoin and subsequently sold 40,000 of them, which tanked the market and flipped the sentiment from bull to bear.

I left that article on a kind of cliff-hanger. You see, at that point, no one knew what would happen to the other 160,000 Bitcoin the authorities had recovered.

But now we know. They are set to be repaid to the original Mt Gox users who they were stolen from. And rumours are that they could be repaid as soon as next month.

(Well, 150,000 of them at least. I have no idea what happened to the other 10,000.)

How could this affect the crypto market? That’s the $3 billion question.

Before we try to answer it. Let’s get up to speed on the whole curse of Mt Gox thing. Below you’ll find the pertinent parts of my 2018 curse of Mt Gox article.

And just to note, I’m not going to put it all in quotes like I usually do. It’s too long for that. But I’ll put in a big 2022 subhead, so you know when we’re back in the present day.

Here we go…


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