The Mt. Gox incident is one of the most famous hacker attacks in the history of cryptocurrency and a highly influential crisis in the early development of Bitcoin. This incident occurred in 2014 and had a profound impact on the global cryptocurrency market.
Mt. Gox was originally a trading card game company, but later transformed into one of the world's largest bitcoin exchanges, handling more than 70% of global bitcoin transactions at its peak. However, the Japan-based exchange did not properly protect its users' assets, which ultimately led to disastrous consequences.
In February 2014, Mt. Gox announced the suspension of all Bitcoin withdrawals due to the discovery of a "transaction malleability" vulnerability. This vulnerability allowed hackers to tamper with the transaction identification code, making it impossible for the exchange to correctly confirm the transaction status, causing the exchange to lose control of the Bitcoin. In the following weeks, Mt. Gox eventually announced that about 850,000 Bitcoins had been stolen, a loss of about $450 million based on the market value at the time. These Bitcoins are equivalent to about 6% of the total Bitcoin supply.
After the incident, Mt. Gox filed for bankruptcy protection on February 28, 2014, and officially declared bankruptcy in April. Hundreds of thousands of users’ Bitcoin deposits evaporated overnight, the global cryptocurrency market fell into panic, Bitcoin prices plummeted, and the trust in the entire industry also dropped significantly.
This incident revealed many problems in the early cryptocurrency industry, especially the security and lack of regulation of exchanges. Although the collapse of Mt. Gox severely hit the market confidence of Bitcoin, it also prompted the entire industry to pay attention to security, regulation and transparency. In the following years, cryptocurrency exchanges around the world gradually strengthened technical security measures, and governments around the world began to study and formulate regulatory frameworks for cryptocurrencies.
Although the Mt. Gox incident was a major setback in the history of cryptocurrency, it also provided valuable lessons for the standardized development of the industry and promoted the further maturity of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. To this day, the Mt. Gox incident is still regarded as an important turning point in the cryptocurrency field. #美国7月PPI低于预期 #WBTC
