💥 850,000 BTC DISAPPEARED
Twelve years later, much of it is still missing. And nobody knows who has the keys. 👀
In 2014, a man cried in front of the cameras. 📷
He said he had lost 850,000 Bitcoin.
$BTC The world 🌏 believed him.
No one knew that the heist had been happening for three years without him noticing.
Mark Karpelès was a 28-year-old French programmer living in Tokyo. 🇯🇵
Introverted. Brilliant with code. Terrible with people.
He had bought Mt. Gox in 2011 for six months of income — nearly nothing.
Three years later, that exchange processed 70% of all Bitcoin transactions on the planet.
He was the most powerful player in crypto without anyone having elected him.
On February 24, 2014, the Mt. Gox site went blank.
No warning. No explanation.
Hours later, an internal document leaked online.
What it said froze the blood of 24,000 users:
850,000 BTC had vanished.
750,000 belonged to real customers. People like you.
What no one told in the news:
The hackers didn’t break in in 2014.
Subsequent investigations revealed they had been stealing Bitcoin since 2011 — quietly, gradually, invisibly.
Three years looting the vault while the exchange remained open, operating, raking in fees.
Mark was arrested in 2015.
Acquitted of fraud. Convicted of falsifying records.
The 850,000 BTC: never fully recovered.
Only 200,000 surfaced — stored in an old wallet that no one remembered.
The rest remains somewhere in the blockchain.⛓️
Still. Unmoving. Waiting.
Today those Bitcoins are worth over 80 billion dollars.
And nobody knows if the thief has them.
If he lost them.
Or if he’s waiting for the exact moment to move them.
What would you do if you had access to a wallet with billions… and moving it meant the entire world would know instantly?
Fran Berlín | Blockchain Institute
#MtGox #bitcoin #CryptoHistory #FranBerlin #InstitutoBlockchain