Mt. Gox
HackedExchange · born 2010 · ✝ 2014
Once 70% of all Bitcoin traffic. Then it vanished.
The original dominant Bitcoin exchange. It lost ~850,000 BTC to a long-running, undetected theft and collapsed in 2014.
- Peak
- ~70% of global BTC volume
- Cause
- Hacked
- Year of death
- 2014
☠️ Cause of death
Years of undetected withdrawals, weak engineering, and no internal controls drained the wallets before anyone noticed.
📓 Lessons left behind
- —Custody is a security discipline, not a feature.
- —Reconcile cold storage continuously.
- —Scale without controls is a slow-motion heist.
🌱 The idea that survived
Institutional-grade custody
Qualified custodians, MPC wallets, and audited cold storage (Fireblocks, BitGo) grew directly out of the Mt. Gox trauma.
#exchange-hack#btc#custody