Remember Mt. Gox? Sure you do!
Although it’s usually said aloud as “Mount Gox”, as if it were a topographic feature, it actually started life as MTGOX, short for Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange, where MTG fans could trade cards via the internet.
The web domain was eventually repurposed for what was, back in 2014, the world’s biggest Bitcoin cryptocurrency exchange.
Mt. Gox was headquartered in Japan, holding what was then a mind-blowing $500,000,000 in other people’s bitcoins (BTC).
And then a strange thing happened: the money, or at least the bitcoins, vanished, just like that.
We’ve never really found out what happened.
Early suggestions blamed a cryptographic flaw known as transaction malleability, but sceptics argued that this sort of treachery, even if if were possible on such an epic scale, would be visible in the Bitcoin transaction record, also known as the blockchain.
Simply put, transaction malleability means that two different transactions can be rigged to have the same supposedly unique identifier. Crooked transactors could, in theory, fraudulently concoct duplicate-yet-different transaction pairs, and use these transactions to trick a naive exchange into thinking that something had gone wrong. Them the crooks could dishonestly repudiate one of the transactions in each pair and demand a refund.
Some experts say that Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are just a scam; others say they’re “the most important invention since the internet.” It’s hard to tell who’s right.
Authored by Silicon Valley leaders from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook, Bubble or Revolution cuts through the hype to offer a balanced, comprehensive, and accessible analysis of blockchains and cryptocurrencies.
