Mircea Popescu: The King of Bitcoin and the Lost Billions
The eccentric billionaire who challenged governments, founded an anarchic exchange, and took one of the largest fortunes in Bitcoin history to the grave.
Around 2011, when Bitcoin was still a forum curiosity, a sharp-minded Romanian man with a disdain for social norms began to stand out in the digital underworld: Mircea Popescu. Cultured, controversial, and visionary, Popescu was not just an investor — he was a walking ideology.
In 2012, he founded MPEx, an unregulated digital asset trading platform with no audits or bureaucracy. MPEx was his personal empire, where he decided who could enter, what was listed, and how the rules worked. To radical libertarians, he was an icon. To regulators and advocates of mass adoption, a nightmare.
His blog, Trilema, made his ideas even more controversial. With dense and challenging writing, Popescu attacked governments, intellectual elites, political correctness — and even other crypto figures like Vitalik Buterin.
But his greatest mystery came after his drowning death in 2021, in Costa Rica. It is estimated that he held up to 100,000 BTC. Since then, none of those coins have moved. Did Popescu leave the equivalent of billions of dollars just… disappear?
Whether as a myth or a martyr, Popescu embodied Bitcoin in its purest and wildest form: uncontrollable, irreverent, and perhaps, unrecoverable.
