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2014The Mt. Gox collapse

Mt. Gox, then the largest Bitcoin exchange, halted withdrawals and collapsed, taking hundreds of thousands of customers’ coins with it. The price spent the rest of the year in a long decline, even as large companies started to accept Bitcoin.

Year-end price (approx.)

~$320

Block reward

25 BTC

Mt. Gox

~850,000 BTC missing

What happened

1. Jan 9

   Overstock.com begins accepting Bitcoin.

2. Feb 28

   Mt. Gox files for bankruptcy protection in Japan, and roughly 850,000 BTC are reported missing.

3. Mar 6

   Newsweek names a California man as Satoshi Nakamoto. He denies it, and the claim does not hold up.

4. Jun 27

   Venture investor Tim Draper wins an auction for about 30,000 BTC seized from Silk Road by US Marshals.

5. Jul 22

   The Ethereum presale begins, opening a new chapter for programmable blockchains.

6. Dec 11

   Microsoft begins accepting Bitcoin for digital content.

Why it mattered

The Mt. Gox failure is why “not your keys, not your coins” became a mantra, and why exchange security and proof of reserves matter.

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