It transpired over the last 24 hours that one man is likely to have been responsible for some of bitcoins biggest price drops over the last few months. The Japanese whale and Mt.Gox bankruptcy trustee we reported on yesterday, who sold almost $400 million worth of BTC, some of it at the very bottom on Feb 6th. He crashed the market by 75% by selling the bitcoins in couple of rounds.
In the following chart made by redditor u/riverflop you can see the exact correlation between the sales of bitcoin by the trustee and the market dumps.
Source:
2017-12-18 2,000 BTC
2017-12-22 6,000 BTC
2018-01-17 8,000 BTC
2018-01-31 6,000 BTC
2018-02-05 6,000 BTC
2018-02-05 6,000 BTC
2018-02-05 6,000 BTC
Kobayashi made his disclosure in the report from the 10th creditors’ meeting, which took place yesterday (Wednesday). 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.
The MT Gox trustee has sold half a billion worth of bitcoin and bitcoin cash between December 2017 and February 2018 it was revealed today.
He sold the first batch of 6k bitcoin on December 22nd, sending price from nearly $16,000 to a brief low of $10,800. Then he waited for market to recover and sold another batch of 8k bitcoins on January 17th. Which again produced the same effect – crashed the bitcoin price.
Kobayashi then does another sell on January 31st, this time for approximately 6k bitcoins. The vast majority of bitcoins were sold on February 6th which implies that he actually tried to crash the market by selling at the bottom.
Something else that many commentators have about is why he is selling on exchanges and not OTC which would smooth out the dumps and not affect the market so profoundly:
The strangest thing about this guy selling 40K #Bitcoin for MtGox victims is that he just sold on exchanges. How can such an incompetent person be in charge of this? Just OTC it.
— WhalePanda (@WhalePanda) March 8, 2018
The trustee still has around another 180k BTC to sell. However, it should be noted that according to redditor u/riverflop:
“MtGox owed creditors 41.5 billion JPY ($391 million) and the total value of the sold BTC is 43 billion JPY ($405 million). This leads me to think they have sold enough BTC to pay off the debt to creditors and won’t be selling any more BTC any time soon (They didn’t sell anything for over a month).”
It it notable that the price bounced back to over $10k which shows how much demand there is for bitcoin, and implies that once these Mt.Gox sell-offs are over, the bitcoin price should start to rise as many crypto commentators have predicted.
We now know that the amazing drop in the price of Bitcoin was caused by a Japanese man liquidating the MTGox hoard. This means that the price of almost $20,000 will return and then be greatly exceeded. There are only a few sources where mega-drops like this can be triggered.
— Beautyon (@Beautyon_) March 7, 2018
Main image courtesy of Zero Hedge.
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