Fascinating piece of history: in 2011, an anonymous man named Kevin bought 259,684.77 bitcoin for a penny each due to a Mt. Gox hack, intercepted a hacker that was buying it all, and showed incredible self constraint to not claim possession.

A person on bitcointalk by the name of “toasty” made a historic thread in how he discovered that a hacker was placing many orders for a penny while he was selling and buying massive amount of bitcoin which crashed the price from $17.50 to near zero.

This person decided to put the $3000 he had on Mt. Gox to his buy order at $0.0101 while hacker was putting $0.01 and it was filled.

He now had 8-10% of the total Bitcoin ever minted at the time. And over 1% that would ever be created.

With this massive amount of bitcoin, he tried to withdraw it to his own wallet because he knew that the exchange was hacked and passwords and emails were being leaked and his account could be next. However, there was a $1000 limit to withdraw in a day. He further said that it could be abused if you could’ve just asked the exchange for more and they would reset the limit. But withdrawing hundreds of Ks of bitcoin would seem sketchy.

He also thought he could’ve sold a gigantic amount of bitcoin and crashed the price to only a fraction of a penny so that his total worth of BTC would be under $1000.

He didn’t because it would only make the hack situation worse.

So he did what was right. He talked to Mark Karpeles, founder of Mt Gox, and had his bitcoins sent back. The trades during the hack were undone. Though he kept 643 BTC.

This person could’ve had $16B worth of BTC at the 2021 ATH if he just kept and held. But if he did, perhaps BTC wouldn't have been successful today.

Given this much power in his hand, he refused it all. He could’ve single-handedly altered the course of crypto to the worse, perhaps even destroying Bitcoin.

This guy may have even saved crypto. Hackers would have no doubt taken it and left, but Kevin absorbed their hit.

It’s fascinating to hear this story and I wonder if you had this much bitcoin in your hands today if an exchange was hacked and you happen to buy them all, would you show self constraint? I’d love to hear your opinions.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=20207.0