850,000 Bitcoin. $450 million. Gone.

Mt. Gox was the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, handling 70% of all Bitcoin transactions globally. Then, in February 2014, it disappeared — taking hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin with it and plunging the cryptocurrency world into its first existential crisis.

The Mt. Gox Collapse tells the complete story: from the exchange's absurd origins as a Magic: The Gathering trading card website, through its chaotic rise to dominance, to the catastrophic collapse and the decade-long aftermath that is still unfolding today.

Inside this book:

• How a trading card website became the world's most important Bitcoin exchange
• Mark Karpeles: the French programmer in Tokyo who ran a financial empire like a hobby project
• The transaction malleability exploit that allowed thieves to drain Bitcoin for years without detection
• The Willy Bot: fake trading that masked insolvency and may have inflated Bitcoin's price
• The leaked crisis document, the bankruptcy filing, and the protests in Tokyo
• The criminal case, the decade-long creditor battle, and the partial recovery
• Why the same pattern repeated with FTX in 2022 — and why it will happen again

This is a story about what happens when revolutionary technology meets amateur operations. It's about the gap between a system that works perfectly in theory and the humans who build the institutions around it. And it's about a community that trusted technology so deeply that they forgot to verify the people running it.

Book 8 in the Digital Outlaws series.

Shane Larson is a software engineer and solutions architect who writes about the human stories behind technology's biggest failures and breakthroughs. The Digital Outlaws series covers the hackers, criminals, and security disasters that shaped the digital world.