7 February 2014: Mt. Gox halts bitcoin withdrawals
Mt. Gox, then the biggest bitcoin exchange, suspended customer withdrawals, blaming a technical problem. The bitcoin price slumped. Within weeks Mt. Gox stopped trading altogether and filed for bankruptcy in Tokyo, saying about 850,000 bitcoins were missing, later revised to about 650,000. Customers learned the oldest lesson in finance in its newest form: if someone else holds your asset, you also own their risk.
The lesson: An asset is only as safe as the place you keep it; custody risk is real risk.
What it meant for investors
$1,000 in Bitcoin at the start of 2015 → $317,460 today, vs $3,301 in the S&P 500.
We start the clock at the start of 2015, the first year in our price data after the event. That is 317.5 times the money, and $314,159 more than a plain index fund made over the same years.
What Bitcoin teaches: Extraordinary returns came bundled with repeated drawdowns of 75 percent or more; the gains went mostly to holders who could survive each collapse without selling.
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | $315 | $317,460 | $3,301 |
| 2018 | $14,000 | $7,143 | $2,519 |
| 2020 | $7,200 | $13,889 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
What if you bought Bitcoin? Every starting year and the full story →
More Bitcoin history
- 3 January 2009: Bitcoin's genesis block is mined
- 12 May 2021: Musk stops accepting Bitcoin for Teslas
- 19 May 2021: Bitcoin's May crash
- 22 May 2010: Two pizzas for 10,000 Bitcoin
- 9 June 2021: El Salvador makes Bitcoin legal tender
- 31 October 2008: Satoshi publishes the Bitcoin white paper
Could you have called it at the time? The wheel picks the year, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick.
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