This week, June 19 marked 15 years since the first major hack in crypto history. Fifteen years, and the story has lost none of its taste for farce, a farce worth several hundred million dollars. In this second article from Folles Histoires Crypto, we pick up where we left off last week: among the absolute pioneers of Bitcoin, those who bought pizzas with thousands of BTC and believed they were building the future. Except that in June 2011, the future almost collapsed suddenly, because of a stolen file and a penny sale order.
The Fragile Empire of Mt. Gox
As of June 2011, Mt. Gox is the center of the bitcoin world. Founded the previous year by Jed McCaleb, originally a Magic: The Gathering Online card exchange platform, hence the name, the exchange was bought by the Frenchman Mark Karpelès and then processed more than 70% of global transactions in bitcoin. Suffice to say that what happens to Mt. Gox, happens to Bitcoin as a whole. On June 19, 2011, an attacker seizes the identifiers of a listener of the platform. With this administrator access, he places a massive sale order for bitcoins at the price of… 1 cent of the dollar. In just a few minutes, the price of bitcoin on Mt. Gox plummets $17.50 to $0.01. Trading bots follow automatically. The alerts are panicking.
The fall in real time
On Bitcointalk, messages accumulate at full speed. A user writes, panicked: “The mtgox price just fell to $0.01. What is happening?! » Others are frantically trying to buy back at a penny, hoping for a quick rebound. This will be one of the best deals in the history of crypto trading — for those who kept a cool head. Mt. Gox suspends withdrawals within an hour, then performs a rollback: all transactions made during the attack are canceled. The platform comes back online with the previous course. Phew. But confidence does not return. In the days that followed, Mt. Gox also revealed a compromise of its user database, with weakly hashed email addresses and passwords circulating on forums.
The shock wave lasts for months
The price of bitcoin, which had reached $31 a few days earlier during a first euphoric bull run, collapsed in the following weeks. In November 2011, he received $2. A drop of 94%. Many are pronouncing the death of Bitcoin. Forums that were brimming with optimism are filling with disillusionment. This hack reveals a brutal truth about the security of crypto platforms: the Bitcoin protocol has not been hacked — its code holds up perfectly. It is the human envelope around him that gives way. A lesson that will take years for the community to fully absorb, and one that Mt. Gox itself will never truly internalize. What’s fascinating in retrospect is that Bitcoin survives. Developers continue to code. The miners turn their machines. And the network did not miss a single block. The first demonstration that the technology is stronger than the market around it. And that not your keys, not your coins is not just a slogan, it is a lesson in survival.