Mt. Gox wasn’t a Bitcoin failure. It was a custody failure.
On February 24, 2014, Mt. Gox, at the time handling the majority of global Bitcoin trading, went offline. 850,000 BTC were missing. For thousands of individuals, it meant devastating losses. For Bitcoin, it became a defining moment.
What’s often misunderstood is that the Bitcoin protocol itself did not fail. Blocks continued to be mined. Transactions continued to settle. The network functioned exactly as designed.
What failed was centralized custody. That distinction reshaped Bitcoin culture. “Not your keys, not your coins” stopped being a slogan and became a lived lesson. The collapse accelerated the development of hardware wallets and pushed serious conversations around key management and seed phrases into the mainstream.
In Prague, builders were already working on solutions that made self-custody practical and accessible.
@slush and
@stick co-founded Trezor, which began shipping the first commercially available Bitcoin hardware wallet in 2014. The year before,
@stick proposed BIP39, the mnemonic seed standard developed within SatoshiLabs that is now widely used across the industry.
Twelve years later, the lesson still stands.
If we want to take Bitcoin seriously, whether as builders, investors, partners, or institutions, we need to understand custody. How it works. How it fails. And how to design systems that reduce single points of trust.
At BTC Prague 2026 (June 11–13), self-custody won’t just be discussed as theory. Attendees will be able to test hardware wallets, speak directly with builders, and experience practical Bitcoin usage in a real-world setting.
Understanding Bitcoin means understanding responsibility.
Get Your ticket today:
BTC Prague
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