Bitcoin
Bitcoin’s Biggest Controversy: Kevin Day’s $16 Billion Mt. Gox Nightmare
Mt. Gox is in the news for its $9 billion worth of Bitcoin transactions to its users, not as a gift reward but as an official return of their stolen assets. More than a decade ago, Mt. Gox was the largest Bitcoin cryptocurrency exchange, but its security breach led to the largest cryptocurrency theft ever, causing the loss of 850,000 Bitcoins. It was worth over $470 million at the time, but now that has turned into $53.3 billion. Thousands of holders have suffered as a result, but in a somewhat related experience, Kevin Day has become embroiled in Bitcoin’s biggest controversy.
O Bitcoin Historiana popular creator on X, revealed the biggest Bitcoin controversy with his recent post, drawing user attention to Kevin Day’s Nightmare.
Introducing Kevin Day of this Bitcoin controversy
Kevin Day was a video game developer and geek from the 1990s. He was a part of popular games like Mortal Komabat, NBA Showtime, and many others. He started a business called Dot-Com, but it failed and pushed Kevin towards BTC when he was looking for hosting sites.
Kevin bought his first Bitcoin when the price was just $7, but soon luck gave him the opportunity to buy the same at a low price of $0.01 on June 19, 2011. At that time, BTC Price had a huge drop, causing the price to drop from $17 to $0.01 in 20 minutes.
Kevin immediately seized the opportunity and bought $3,000 worth of BTC. However, this was the beginning of Bitcoin’s biggest controversy as it was part of the Mt. Gox hack.
Mt. Gox snatched back the Bitcoins
By some random stroke of luck, Kevin had purchased 259,684 BTC at that point for $3,000. Interestingly, the price of Bitcoin recovered, and he made gains of 166,000%, making $5 million from a few thousand investments.
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But luck was short-lived, as Mount GoxBitcoin exchange, announced the reason behind this drop. According to the exchange, the hackers stole the tokens and sold them at the market low. But the worst part was that all these stolen tokens were going to be reversed, meaning that all the trades made after the hack were not legitimate and were canceled, including Kevin’s trades.
Hero or hacker? $16 billion lost
By this time, Kevin had already become part of the biggest controversy in Bitcoin. More importantly, he was considered a hacker because he was able to buy BTC at such low prices.
The controversy grew with the revelation that just before the rollback, he withdrew 643 BTC. With many calling him a hacker and suing him for stealing those 643 Bitcoin, Kevin continued his fight. He appeared in several interviews, responding to his decency.
On the other hand, he was called a hero. It is because despite the possibility of suing Mt. Gox, Kevin refrained from doing so so that the Bitcoin ecosystem would not be affected.
Eventually, Kevin lost 259,684 BTC as exchanges deleted all trades. With this Bitcoin controversy, Kevin lost 16.3 billion BTC worth $63K today.
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