Peter R (OP)
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March 02, 2014, 10:01:28 PM
Last edit: October 25, 2015, 09:30:52 PM by Peter R |
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Peter R Rizun’s Theory on the Collapse of Mt. Gox
TL/DR: A young man had a secret. To keep it hidden, he kept digging until the hole was a billion dollars deep. This is a speculative tale of a great bitcoin theft from MtGox in 2011 and the efforts that this man undertook to fix it. The tale explains the bitcoin bear market of 2011, the explosive rally of 2013, delayed fiat withdrawals, malled transactions, and a bot named Willy.
“By the time you realize that real life has begun, you are already three moves in.”—Author unknown
It was June 19, 2011. Mark, a 26 year-old young man—a boy really—was ecstatic. He had recently purchased MtGox—a small, online exchange for trading virtual tokens—and business was booming. These virtual tokens were called bitcoins and Mark loved them.
Bitcoins were an obscure curiosity: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system that allowed users to store and exchange credits with any other user in the world, nearly instantly, and without the assistance of a third-party or the permission of an authority. All that was needed was a 78-digit secret number—a key if you will.
In order for his customers to withdraw their bitcoins over the internet, MtGox stored some of these keys on its online server. The remaining keys were stored on USB drives and backed up on paper to prevent theft should the server be compromised.
But theft was hardly a concern. In October of 2010, bitcoins were trading for $0.10 and the half a million bitcoins held by MtGox was worth only $50,000. But still Mark took precautions, diligently moving bitcoins to offline storage and leaving only what was necessary for customer withdrawals online. He truly wanted both his business and bitcoin to succeed.
By April, the bitcoin price had risen to $1 and by June it had exploded to $30. Between June 1 and June 15, an additional one million bitcoins were sent to MtGox and immediately sold, crashing the price back to $10. It was a hectic time, with hundreds of customers needing help, visits from the FBI related to the Silk Road black market, and stress related to the recent market crash. Young Mark was becoming a victim of his own success: there simply wasn’t enough time to get everything done. On this very day in June 2011, the keys to the recently-deposited 1,000,000 BTC were still sitting on his server.
Later this day, a group of hackers gained access to MtGox servers and executed fake trades that the world could see, driving the nominal price of bitcoin near $0. Mark was frantic. He quickly regained control of the servers and learned the dark truth: the million bitcoins that had recently flooded in earlier that month were gone. Mark admitted publically to the hack, rewound the false trades, but kept the truth of the missing coins a secret.
How could this 26-year old explain to his customers that he had lost their bitcoins? And if the world found out, would this kill the thing he loved so dearly? Would he go to jail? Or worse yet, would someone kill him? Mark decided that he would do what he thought was right: he would slowly earn back the lost bitcoin with MtGox trading fee profits and eventually make his customers whole again. He still had over 500,000 BTC left—he moved 424242.42424242 BTC between bitcoin addresses and convinced the community that MtGox was solvent. As long as withdrawals didn’t exceed deposits over a long period of time, no one would ever find out the truth. Or so he thought.
Meanwhile, the bitcoin thieves slowly mixed their coins with other coins, obfuscating the chain of ownership, and then re-selling these coins on MtGox using sock-puppet accounts. Mark tried to stop them, but there was no way he could know for sure which accounts were fraudulent—he even accused innocent people of bitcoin laundering. The constant selling of these stolen bitcoins drove the price down to $2 in November 2011. Mark faithfully used all of the MtGox profits to purchase coins back during this decline. But he would never use customer funds—that was a line he swore not to cross.
The selling of these stolen bitcoins continued at a diminished rate over 2012, and Mark continually purchased coins using the MtGox trading fees. The bitcoin economy was growing and new exchanges were opening up across the world. His bitcoin reserves weren’t building fast enough but the price of bitcoin kept rising (along with the dollar value of the missing bitcoins). He was worried that other exchanges would suck coins out of Gox and reveal his secret. He decided he needed to take decisive action: for the first time, he used customer funds to purchase real bitcoins. These large purchases by Mark further increased demand and ignited the great rally of spring 2013 when the bitcoin price shot from $20 to $266. Mark had reduced his liability in bitcoins, but in dollar terms the coins that were still missing were worth more than ever before.
On May 15, 2013 the US Department of Homeland Security seized millions of dollars from the MtGox Dwolla bank account. MtGox dollar reserves were already depleted at this point, and with the recent seizure, Mark could no longer make good on customer withdrawals in US dollars.
Under the guise of “banking problems,” MtGox slowed US dollar withdrawals to a trickle in the summer of 2013. Customers became increasingly worried and began to bid up the price of bitcoin on MtGox, as this was the only way to escape with their funds. MtGox had little fiat and very little bitcoins, but it learned one thing: as the price differential between Gox and BitStamp grew, the outwards flow of bitcoin slowed dramatically.
And so Willy was born. Willy was a bot, discovered by Wall Observers from bitcointalk.org and named by Opet on Bonavest's trading show, who would consistently purchased bitcoins at regular intervals between November 2013 and February 2014. Evidence that Willy belonged to Mark was revealed when both web and API trading at Gox was disabled for a brief period of time, exposing Willy as the only one left buying.
Willy served two purposes: he drove the price of bitcoin on the MtGox exchange high, thereby slowing and sometimes reversing the outward flow of real BTC, and he reduced the number of GoxBTC held by clients. Of course, this meant that Willy eventually became the owner of a huge number of GoxBTC (that were of course no longer backed by real BTC).
By December, the situation at MtGox was grim. In a desperate attempt to attract more funds, Mark offered reduced trading fees under the guise of celebrating their 1,000,000th customer. This partially worked, but Mark knew it was too late. If MtGox collapsed, it must appear that he didn’t know about the theft until now—for it was better to appear incompetent than criminal.
It was time to cover his tracks.
He purposely mixed immature coins into bitcoin withdrawals to delay the outward flow of coins, and later began malling his own transactions. He added the Gox malleability weakness not as a bug, but as a feature, so that it would seem plausible that outsiders had recently stolen the coins without his awareness. No coins were actually lost to malleability.
The MtGox coin supply dwindled to 2,000 BTC and on February 7, 2014 he had no choice but to disable bitcoin withdrawals. The end was near.
The problem Mark faced was that his customers had $150,000,000 credited to their accounts, yet the MtGox bank account only contained $38,000,000. He could blame the missing bitcoins on transaction malleability, but how could he explain where the fiat money went?
He shifted Willy into reverse and cranked the throttle. Willy relentlessly dumped bitcoins into the open bids. The price fell further and further, eventually dropping well below the BitStamp price. But still not enough people were buying! He needed his customers to buy the GoxBTC. Willy kept dumping coins until finally the price dropped below $100. MtGox even acquired new USD bank wires from customers looking to purchase the cheap coins. By this time, the majority of Gox customers had converted their dollars into bitcoins.
On February 28, 2014, Mt Gox filed for bankruptcy protection in Tokyo, reporting 6.5 billion yen in liabilities, 3.8 billion yen in assets, and 750,000 of customer bitcoins missing. Willy had failed to completely close the fiat solvency gap and Mark finally admitted to having lost the coins.
Now we watch the rest of the story unfold. A story of how an oversight during a hectic period, an untimely theft, and an attempt to cover it up, lead to the greatest loss in the history of bitcoin.
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