Meet The 'Man' Who Crashed Bitcoin In 2018
Content adapted from this Zerohedge.com article : Source
The Whale of the Rising Sun revealed that, since September, he sold Bitcoin off. The total amount was about $400 million. This could be a big reason for the recent pull back in Bitcoin pricing which also had an effect on the alt-coins.
Nobuaki Kobayashi is the bankruptcy trustee for Mt. Gox.
Mt. Gox was the largest exchange before hackers took off with billions of dollars worth of bitcoin from tens of thousands of customers. Mr. Kobayashi started selling the tokens in September meaning he most likely sold some at the recent peak near $20,000.
In the report, he said he'd started selling off the bitcoin and bitcoin cash to raise money for disbursements that the trustee will soon need to begin making as bankruptcy claims are being evaluated, per Bloomberg.
Matt Odell (@Matt_Odell ) presents the full list of transfers out of their wallet.
As Odell points out "More than half of the bitcoin they sold (18k btc) was transferred to an exchange on Feb 5th. The day before bitcoin hit its 3 month low of ~$6000. They panicked and sold the bottom. Market absorbed it well."
The arrows are the date the bitcoin was transferred out of the Mt. Gox wallets, not the sale date. That probably happened a couple days later as the bitcoin was moved to exchanges.
Bitcoin could face more selling pressure as Kobayashi is sitting upon anoth $1.9 billion worth of bitcoin as reported by Bloomberg.
He says he will offload them soon.
Non-adapted content found at zerohedge.com: Source
It's funny how a person single handedly affects the market globally. $400 million is a massive amount of money.. This honestly couldn't leave the market the same. Selling coins exerts a lot of influence on the market. And I feel their should be a limit set for the whales selling coins. I feel we are yet to see a huge dip which will be exerted by Kobayashi if he decides to sell off the $1.9 billion worth of bitcoin.
Not compared to the entire market. I dont know what Bitcoin trades in a day but it is in the billions.
$400M in a day might be of impact, but over 6 months? I dont buy it.
Don't forget Korea and its claims of banning crypto. It scared a lot of asians, and maybe this Gox was one of them.
Well this has led to some really annoying drops, I hope it goes lower because I missed the last 6k price point. It's crazy how one whale can disrupt an entire market, this is why we need more money in the market. The reason stocks are typically less volatile has to be the crazy amount of money in them, crypto has less than Facebook alone, so when whales wanna sell everyone panicks
What is crazy is that people believe that $400M is selling affected a market that has billions ($7.7B in the last 24 hours) when moved over a 6 month period.
It didnt happen. Selling $400M in one day...that has an impact. I doubt if he dumped it all in one month if it would make up that much of a difference.
What do you think it was, just a combination of bad headlines and other FUD? I guess I thought the numbers were higher, is this just mistaken FUD? The dates do line up, but maybe that's just coincidence.
To be fair, a whale could disrupt the market, I'm sure there are a few out there with substantial holdings that could spark a fear based sell-off
Don't forget Korea and its claims of banning crypto. It scared a lot of asians, and maybe this Gox was one of them.
Bitcoin daily trading volume is over 9 Billions USD. He didn’t crash the market, but he definitely made things much worse by being grossly incompetent. Looks like he panicked and he sold most of it at the lowest point. He would have had a much, much better deal selling OTC from the start.
Further, the main reason for selling this comparatively small share of the MtGox BTC and BCH holdings (yes they own both now) was to pay for his fees and some of the MtGox Fiat debts. They still sit on over 160.000 BTC and BCH while MtGox customer haven't received anything yet.
On the bright side, at least those Bitcoins were distributed instead of being offloaded to a whale
hmm, so we might see some prices going down even deeper if he decided to sell everything he got. Gosh, the whole market could go really low! Surely those who believe in cryptos won't sell no matter what, but a lot of people are getting scared that these coins will go down to 0. Yeah, like that will ever happen!
Hehehe....this guy is really making our life hard. In stead of bringing the money is pulling it out. What about us who invested when Bitcoin was a bit high. Well, it was my fault by then.
This will be an opportunity for people planning to invest in Bitcoin since the price may go down and the many people will be tempted to start pulling out their coins.
On my side, I'm not scared cause I know that one day Bitcoin will reach high and high and I'll earn much from it especially these days when the whole world is trying to understand Bitcoin and invest in it.
@jona12
Worst class action ever.
normally you get a coupon for $10 off your next visit or something stupid.
They are giving back the JPY value at the time of shut down.
I checked the box to be paid back in bitcoin.
so they dump it on the market.. makes no sense they are going to have to buy back.
as a claim holder I should at least get some inside alerts on when the dumps will happen so i can position myself. maybe the big claim holders do have that access, but i only have a small claim. although, if they would just give me back my btc it would be significantly more.
I had been trying to pull my coins out in the last days. I knew there were issues, so I pulled out half at a time, submitted a ticket for failed withdraws, and tried again.
I also had btc that I accidentally returned to an address that MTGox used to send to me. I submitted a ticket, and they were not "able" to find it. It was a small amount at the time, but is a very significant amount now. So many lessons to be learned over the years, most are quite simple. Hold your keys, p2p only exchanges. escrow for products, check reputation thoroughly.
Yes, this is true. But you also have an army of bitcoin sleuths who are still pissed off about how the whole Gox thing went down, myself included. Maybe if you were handling your dads estate and no one knew better, but a boomer trades stolen bitcoin on the open market at his own risk. A lot of shady people were on Gox with a lot of connections to violent organized crime. It was the wild west in those days still and I wouldnt want to cross them. Again.
Once the judge allows MtGox to enter Civil Rehabilitation then the remaining 160K btc are not governed by bankruptcy law which required cash payouts to claimants. The remaining bitcoins are merely corporate assets that must be returned to stockholders. And the stakeholders Karpeles, and some would argue, all his customers overwhelmingly prefer bitcoin to cash.
Since there will be no legal reason to sell the bitcoins they will not appear on the market.
Honestly, is $400M worth of Bitcoin sold over a 6 month period that much?
I know for an individual it is but did it have anything to do with the market pullback. If he started selling in September and sold throughout, a lot was done during a run up. I know he pushed a lot through in the last couple months, yet it is still a small amount compared to the entire market.
Depending upon the time you looked at it, I believe BTC has a market cap as high as $300BILLION...$400M is a small amount....especially when you look at daily trading volume.
Even if he dumps the $1.9B over the course of a month, I dont think that is a lot compared to the overall volume.
If I had to guess, the market drop mirrored the ramp up of the futures market.
More likely is a bunch of people shorted the hell out of it on the future market ending up in BTC having downward pressure.
This makes more sense to me than a guy with $400M dumping it over 6 months.
Well I am not a crypto Guru but this doesnt seem like a bad reason to sell off the bitcoin. Is it?
Hmmm so in other words bitcoin might go lower than 6k this time...mehn this is bad news enough for today.
Its not all bad, more supply and a nice entering point :)