🚨 The recent price drop of #Bitcoin is believed to be linked to Mt. Gox – What happened?
📊 In February 2014, following a hack resulting in the loss of more than 80,000 #BTC , equivalent to $50 million at the time, the Bitcoin exchange platform Mt. Gox was forced to declare bankruptcy, tying up 140,000 BTC belonging to these customers.
💰 In terms of #dollars , the loss today is almost $5 billion, while the 140,000 BTC receivables are worth $8.5 billion today.
🟢 In December 2023, Mt. Gox began reimbursing a portion of its customers in fiat currency. A few weeks later, the platform announced that it was preparing to reimburse its customers in Bitcoin (BTC) as well as Bitcoin Cash (#BCH ). It appears that this process began earlier this week.
🎯 More than 10 years later, the repayment of debts is excellent news for former customers of the platform, who will receive their BTC with a capital gain of 1,000%, given that its price is now 61,000 dollars compared to around 600 dollars at the time of bankruptcy. They will also receive their BCH, the blockchain token split in 2017, which is now worth just under $400 at the current price.
🕹️ However, for the rest of the market, the reimbursement of such sums represents a risk of massive profit-taking, which could create strong selling pressure on the price of Bitcoin. Thus, shortly after the announcement, the price of BTC fell sharply.
🚨 The recent fall of Bitcoin was a “sell the news”.
🔶 While it is impossible to determine with certainty whether the Mt. Gox news was actually the trigger for BTC's recent decline, we can at least say that it served as a pretext to initiate the fall.
🔶 Ryan Lee, a research analyst, told The Block that the announcement was a "classic 'sell the news' scenario."