Mt Gox news pushes Bitcoin further down to $60,000

A brief message about Mt Gox quickly pushed the Bitcoin price down several percentage points on Monday. All Bitcoins that were recovered after the infamous 2014 hack will be refunded as from next week. The first batch of Bitcoins to be returned are worth $9 billion, which is bound to put major price pressure on crypto coins.

Germany is dumping $3B and now MtGox is dumping $9B Bitcoin. pic.twitter.com/O5zWlzr6iG

— Charles Edwards (@caprioleio) June 24, 2024

Analysts expect that investors who lost their Bitcoins in the 2014 Mt Gox hack, and who are now getting them back, will sell them rapidly as Bitcoin currently trades at a price of $60,000.

The Mt Gox news, coupled with the billion-dollar sale by the German government that we talked about yesterday, is putting pressure on the prices of almost all major crypto coins.

Genesis

If the world of crypto were anything like bible, then Mt. Gox would be the creation story or Genesis if you will. It was the first major event in the world of crypto, after the invention of Bitcoin itself.

Mt. Gox (Mount Gox, or Magic The Gathering Online Exchange) was the first major crypto platform that allowed Bitcoin trading as from 2011.

Mt Gox was based in Tokyo, the capital of Japan, and at its peak traded almost 70% of all Bitcoin in worldwide circulation at the time.

On February 7th, 2014, Mt. Gox no longer allowed users to withdraw Bitcoin from the platform and three days later the company explains that there was a bug in the Bitcoin software.

When CEO Mark Karpelès finally gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal on February 17th, 2014, he admitted that there were ‘security problems’, indicating a possible hack. A week later, on February 24th , 2014, the Mt Gox website went offline and the URL returned a ‘blank page’.

Many of the hacked Bitcoins have since been recovered though.

Repayment

It was lawyer Nobuaki Kobayashi who sent billions of crypto value up in smoke on Monday when he posted a short message on the Mt Gox website. He said the first Bitcoin refunds would take place in July, i.e. in a week from now.

Mt. Gox To Distribute Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash Repayments Starting Beginning Of July 2024: Notice pic.twitter.com/8PXJiiLFQF

— Tree News (@News_Of_Alpha) June 24, 2024

As a reminder, the Tokyo court ruled last year that all debtors must be repaid by the end of October 2024.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading for $61,000.