be Kevin Day

• 1990s geek from Nebraska
• video game developer who worked on Mortal Kombat 4, NBA Showtime, and NFL Blitz
• once met Luke Skywalker himself Mark Hamill
• startup dies in the dot-com crash
• starts hosting websites
• falls for Bitcoin because of that early internet freedom vibe
• joins at $7 when it was ripping from $0.30
• frantically trying to mine
• June 19, 2011, Bitcoin crashes from $17 to $0.01 in 20 minutes on Mt. Gox
• while everyone else panics, he bids $3,000 at $0.0101
• walks away with 259,684 BTC for under $3k
• 166,000% gain on the table
• goes on early Bitcoin TV explaining how he just made $5 million
• turns out it was a hack, someone stole the coins and dumped them
• Mt. Gox announces they’re rolling back every trade after the hack
• he had already withdrawn the maximum allowed: 643 BTC
• the rest gets erased
• community loses its mind, half call him the hacker, half call him a hero
• he goes on record saying the trade was legitimate and the exchange should eat the loss
• lawyers tell him to sue
• he refuses because he doesn’t want to tank Bitcoin
• puts the network over his own bag
• Mt. Gox does what exchanges always do
• erases the trades anyway
• he loses ~259k $BTC
• keeps the 643 and the only lesson that ever mattered
never leave your coins on an exchange.