Historic overview

Mt. Gox was a bitcoin exchange based in Tokyo, Japan. This exchange launched in 2010, though orginally it was founded in 2006 as an exchange to trade Magic: The Gathering Online cards. That explains the acronom MTGOX. In early 2014, it handled over 70% of all Bitcoin transactions:

Source: Miles Deutscher

Then, February 2014, when it all looked golden for Mt Gox, customer complaints were increasingas people were experiencing huge delays trying to withdraw their Bitcoin. Mt. Gox then suddenly suddenly ceased operations on 7 February 2014 due to revelations of its involvement in the loss (well, theft) of 850K Bitcoin. That would be more than 4% of the total Bitcoin supply right now.

Wizsec, a security company, concluded a year later that "most or all of the missing bitcoins were stolen straight out of the Mt. Gox hot cryptocurrency wallet over time, beginning in late 2011." This has often been labeled as the biggest black swan in history.

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Now, the unlocks will finally start

As of March 10, 137,890 Bitcoin will (start to) be unlocked. The value is over 3 billion USD. With Bitcoin at a price of $22,430 at the time of writing, this is an insane increase for the creditors, because when they lost access to their Bitcoin, the value of Bitcoin was around $800.

Credit: lookonchain

The question is, what will the effect be on Bitcoin's price and how much of the 138K Bitcoins will be sold? The creditors are sitting on a lot of profit thanks to forced HODL. We already know from 2022 that a relatively minor percentage of the supply can do a lot of damage to the price of Bitcoin...