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Block beats BlockBeats (ID: BlockBeats)
Block beats BlockBeats (ID: BlockBeats)
, author: 0x29, 0x66, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.
MT.Gox, the Mentougou trading platform, was born earlier than Ethereum. It stands to reason that this trading platform, which was shut down due to the thunderstorm, should have been out of the scope of investors’ attention long ago, just like the blockchain projects of the same period. Yes, but the reality is otherwise. From the old players who suffered losses a few years ago to the new leeks who entered the market this year, they all have to pay close attention to this trading platform that once accounted for 80% of the global Bitcoin trading volume.
The reason is simple, old players are waiting to lose money, and new leeks are afraid of smashing the market.
Six years ago, Huobi and OKEx were far from the current size. As the absolute top platform of the cryptocurrency trading platform at that time, the Mentougou trading platform revealed that it had lost 850,000 bitcoins, shocking the world in one fell swoop. Now looking at its performance at the time, it was no less than Ruixing Coffee’s self-exposed turnover fraud. Ruixing’s fraudulent 2.2 billion was close to half of its annual turnover, while the 850,000 bitcoins lost in Mentougou accounted for 7% of the bitcoin flow at that time. Ruixing’s stock plummeted by 80%, and Mentougou directly dropped Bitcoin, a global commodity, by 20%.
Thunderstorm incidents on trading platforms are actually not surprising in recent years. FCoin is the example in front of us. What is the probability that the victims can get their assets back if they try their best? As time goes by, "feeling unlucky" may be the last choice for most people.
However, although Mentougou suffered the most serious thunderstorm in the history of encryption, it did not make the victims lose hope. Some victims even thanked Mentougou. The long compensation process made them passively hold positions.
From declaring bankruptcy and liquidation to making a compensation plan, the whole process has been stalemate for six years. Mentougou is not saying that it will not pay back the money, but the confirmation process of the debt and the payment plan is too difficult.
Last week, the compensation plan, which was originally scheduled to be submitted to the court at the end of the month, was postponed for another four months when it was only close to the door, and the result would not come out until July this year.
In 6 years, Mentougou has transformed from a trading platform into a custodian holding hundreds of thousands of bitcoins. It has also been "threatening" the encryption industry for many years. When the final payment plan is implemented, will the encryption market usher in a crazy " "Smash the plate"?
Let's look at the issue from the creditor's point of view first.
"Felt like money dropped from the sky"
"Because it was a trading platform with high depth and large transaction volume on the market at that time, and it could be directly bound to a bank card for purchase, so Mt.Gox was used." In April 2013, Niu Fengxuan, the founder of DappReview, who was still in the United States, went from He heard about Bitcoin from a friend, and seeing the price of Bitcoin rose from tens of dollars to $250, he quickly entered the market.
The performance of Bitcoin did not disappoint him. From the second half of the year to December, the price of Bitcoin soared from more than 100 US dollars to 1,000 US dollars. At this time, Niu Fengxuan gradually transferred the currency to Coinbase. It's so ugly, it feels like a website from ten years ago." Unexpectedly, this inadvertent maneuver made him escape.
At the end of 2013, Niu Fengxuan began to "switch to" Coinbase, and tested the screenshot of the coin transfer
At the beginning of 2014, Mentougou suddenly heard the news of "delay in cash withdrawal" and "crazy run". In a major bitcoin theft case, 744,408 bitcoins were stolen." For a while, rumors spread and people panicked, and then the official announced the theft, confirming that in addition to the mentioned bitcoins, there were 100,000 bitcoins on the platform among the lost assets .
850,000 bitcoins, accounting for 7% of the circulation at that time. Although about 200,000 pieces were retrieved from the cold wallet later, it was a drop in the bucket, and the assets of users on the platform can be said to be "disappeared" overnight.
It is understood that there are about 100,000 victims on the Mentougou platform, of which Chinese users account for 30 to 40 percent, and many of the victims are large households, and the most serious victim lost 40,000 bitcoins.
After hearing the news, Niu Fengxuan remained calm. After the transfer some time ago, his account in Mentougou has less than ten coins, and the loss is not too heavy.
Another investor, Zhou Lan (pseudonym), has hundreds of coins on the Mentougou platform, but he can't withdraw any of them. In fact, he had already discovered that Mentougou was difficult to withdraw coins, but it was too late to operate when he found out. After seeing the news from Mentougou, he quickly replaced all other coins in the account with BTC, a total of several hundred coins.
Some investors who could not get their assets back brought Mentougou and its CEO Mark Karpeles to court. While accepting the lawsuit, the Tokyo District Court appointed lawyer Nobuaki Kobayashi as the liquidation trustee. The repayment plan is to pay with about 200,000 bitcoins left on the platform, and these 200,000 bitcoins are the huge amount of bitcoins that are worried about the secondary market, and have long been regarded as an invisible "bomb" in the encryption market exist.
"At that time, the prosecutor asked us whether to choose legal currency or bitcoin for compensation, and I chose bitcoin." Zhou Lan said. There are two options for this compensation plan, lose money or lose money. Where does the money come from?
"Actually, when Bitcoin was at a high point in 2017, prosecutors sold about 70,000 coins." Zhou Lan told us that obviously, most of the legal currency compensation funds came from this.
According to public documents, Rhythm BlockBeats found that Mentougou sold 35,841 BTC and 34,008 BCH from December 2017 to March 7, 2018, for a total of 42.9 billion yen (about 383 million U.S. dollars) (1); from 2018 From March 7th to June 22nd, 24,658 BTC and 25,331 BCH were sold, realizing a total of 25.976 billion yen (about 231 million U.S. dollars) (2).
According to public information, before the first sell-off, the bankruptcy foundation owned 166,334 bitcoins and 168,177 BCH (1). After counting the second batch of sell-offs, the remaining amount is not much different from the public cold wallet address numbers (the extra part may be stored elsewhere). At present, there are still about 140,000 coins in the wallet address of the Mentougou platform.
Now the compensation plan is still not determined, no one knows the final result, and the ratio of choosing to pay in legal currency to compensation in currency is also unknown. Zhou Lan made a rough calculation by herself.
The fiat currency compensation is based on the price at the time of the accident. After selling 70,000 coins, we got 600 million US dollars, which can basically cover the total amount of fiat currency of 475 million US dollars, which may lead to many people choosing fiat currency. Compensation; victims who choose to pay with coins may get more coins than expected. Everything has not yet been concluded, and the answer will only be revealed in July this year, "Maybe (the proportion of compensation victims who choose legal currency and Bitcoin) is half and half."
But as far as Rhythm BlockBeats understands, some victims are basically satisfied with the compensation plan. Six years after the accident, it is still possible to get compensation. "It makes me feel like a sum of money suddenly fell from the sky." In Niu Fengxuan's own words, this compensation plan is "very conscientious."
Who will smash the plate?
On the issue of sorting out the smashing, I have to mention the third-party organization Fortress Investment Group in this incident.
According to reports, starting from 2017, an encrypted investment institution named Fortress Investment Group (Fortress Investment Group) began to send emails and even paper documents to many investors based on the public information of Mentougou creditors, trying to use A certain price "purchases" the "Bitcoins" on their Mentougou account.
Zhou Lan has received emails from Fortress more than once. He even received a printed paper document from overseas in March this year. "They are very persistent. Although they don't spend much money, they have done a lot of homework."
Emails received by Mentougou creditors
According to his introduction, if the transfer is agreed, the two parties will sign an agreement. At that time, Fortress may cooperate with the trading platform that helped Mentougou liquidation (note: it has not been disclosed which one, and Bitpoint, the platform that Kobayashi sold Bitcoin before, was arrested in July last year. Steal tens of millions of dollars in assets, and therefore rectify) contact. "If someone is in a hurry to use the money, or is unwilling to wait until the day when the compensation is paid, it is very likely that they will agree to transfer."
Although Zhou Lan has received invitations many times, Zhou Lan did not agree, but he guessed that "there should be investors who agree." In September last year, Andy Pag, the founder of the Mt. Gox Legal website, said in an interview that he had followed the 600 The price of US dollars transferred bitcoins, he revealed, which is a New York-based investment company.
Rhythm boldly speculates that this company is most likely Fortress: Fortress is headquartered in New York, and the location is in line; in March 2019, Fortress had bid $600 to acquire this part of Bitcoin, and the price was in line. In July last year, Fortress raised the price to $900, in December they were asking $755, and in February this year, the purchase price increased to about $1300 (3). From the price point of view, the bidding price basically follows the trend of Bitcoin price, and then carries out the corresponding "discount".
At present, we don’t know how many bitcoins Fortress has successfully acquired, but due to the different bids and costs in different time periods, the arbitrage income of this institution may not be obvious until the day Mentougou actually pays the compensation.
And the victims who got the compensation, what do they think?
"Continue to be a holder." This is Niu Fengxuan's answer. Similarly, this answer also represents that among the several creditors contacted by Rhythm BlockBeats, they all indicated that they would continue to hold it.
The protracted compensation process has instead turned many investors into currency holders. "The dozens of coins I transferred to Coinbase were sold at a price of 400-500 US dollars as early as 2014." If Mentougou If there is no bankruptcy, Niu Fengxuan's few bitcoins may have been sold long ago, and they cannot be kept until now.
Of course, we don’t know how many people will choose to pay bitcoin at that time. If these early players are sufficiently dispersed and their attitude towards bitcoin is “friendly” enough, there may not be a crisis of concentrated selling in the short term. At least the possibility of these victims smashing Bitcoin is not as high as imagined.
But what about other forks of Bitcoin?
Different fates of forked coins
In the payment draft disclosed last week, forked coins such as Bitcoin SV and BTG were not mentioned among the optional payment encrypted assets. Once the payment ratio is determined, these assets will be sold by the foundation in full, and converted into legal currency.
Most of the forks of Bitcoin converged in the second half of 2017. At that time, fanatical crypto speculators flocked to it, and many people focused on Bitcoin and forked under the banner of "improvement". Bitcoin Gold and Bitcoin Diamond appeared. According to the rules, these forked coins are airdropped to the addresses where bitcoins are stored, and the address of Mentougou is no exception. Although Kobayashi’s last sale was in June 2018 at the latest, before this time, we did not find any sales records of forked coins in the relevant documents. Fork coins.
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) was also born at that time, and in November 2018 Bitcoin SV was born. According to the Mentougou cold wallet addresses announced by CryptoGround, Rhythm found that these addresses also store the same amount of BCH and Bitcoin SV as Bitcoin. According to the draft, Bitcoin SV and other forked coins will be dumped in full.
Although there are many forked coins of Bitcoin, only BCH and Bitcoin SV are still concerned. A person familiar with the situation and Rhythm BlockBeats explained that currently forked coins such as Bitcoin Gold and Diamond are basically in a state of "alive and dead". "The sell-off wave in 2018 has long passed." Even if the currency flows into the market, it "can't stir up any waves." In other words, it may face a situation where no one will accept the order.
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