|
"41-year-old foreigner drowned at Hermosa Beach in Garabito." On June 23, the news of this incident published in the local media in Costa Rica did not attract attention until the "41-year-old foreigner" who drowned in the news was confirmed to be Mircea Popescu, an early investor in Bitcoin and founder of the MPEx exchange (now closed).
In the Bitcoin circle, Mircea Popescu is regarded as one of the largest single Bitcoin holders. He once claimed to own 1 million Bitcoins, but the circle conservatively estimates that he holds tens of thousands. Based on the current market price of Bitcoin at $36,000, 10,000 BTC is worth $360 million.
In addition to being an early investor in Bitcoin and the founder of a long-established cryptocurrency exchange, Mircea Popescu is a well-deserved Bitcoin evangelist and defender of fundamentalism. He has been writing about Bitcoin on his blog since 2012, supporting open source projects, and even threatening developers with "selling 1 million Bitcoins" to prevent the Segwit2X fork that was popular in 2016.
However, Mircea Popescu's Bitcoin assets have never been confirmed, and his accidental death has also made the amount and whereabouts of these Bitcoins a mystery. If he really holds a huge amount of Bitcoin, then who holds the private key will determine the "life and death" of these assets.
Bitcoin evangelist drowns in ocean swim
Mircea Popescu was reported in Costa Rican local media as a "41-year-old foreigner". At 8:30 a.m. local time on June 23, he was swept away by the current while swimming in the Garabito Sea and died on the spot. The judicial authorities confirmed his identity as "Mircea Popescu of Polish descent."
Perhaps it was the information of "Polish descent" that disturbed the overseas currency circle, because in that circle, Bitcoin celebrity Mircea Popescu has always been Romanian. When he first wrote articles about Bitcoin in 2012, he used his native Romanian, and later switched to English.
But with the confirmation of the three female friends of the deceased and industry insiders, his identity was confirmed. The "41-year-old foreigner" who drowned in the ocean of Costa Rica was Mircea Popescu, an early Bitcoin evangelist, investor, and founder of MPEx exchange.
Public information shows that Popescu grew up in Romania, graduated from Avram Iancu University, and has lived in countries such as the United States, Mexico, Costa Rica and Egypt. In 2007, Popescu founded an enterprise resource planning company in Romania. Mircea Popescu's blog page
Popescu's involvement with Bitcoin can be traced back to 2011, as he began writing about Bitcoin, supporting security-focused open source projects, and working to keep the Bitcoin network intact early the following year. It was three years after the Bitcoin white paper was published, and Bitcoin was worth less than $100. In April 2012, he also founded an exchange called MPEx.
Before 2016, Mircea Popescu was at most an active figure in the cryptocurrency circle. When the Bitcoin network planned to upgrade and expand with the Segwit2X plan, this "Bitcoin fundamentalist" opposed changing the Bitcoin block size of 1MB, and even declared that if the Bitcoin block size changed, he would sell 1 million Bitcoins on the market.
It was also at that time that the industry began to take notice of this “Bitcoin whale.” In the end, the Segwit2X plan that could have caused a fork in the Bitcoin network failed, and the network retained a block size of 1MB.
There is no data or evidence to support whether Popescu actually has 1 million bitcoins, but the industry speculates that he has tens of thousands of bitcoins based on the time he entered the bitcoin field, the low price of the currency at the time, and his entrepreneurial experience. If only 10,000 bitcoins are calculated, at the current unit price of $36,000, Popescu's bitcoin worth is about $360 million.
No one would have thought that such a wealthy Bitcoin tycoon would eventually fall in the waters of Costa Rica. Popescu's radical words and deeds during his lifetime and his threat to developers to sell off his coins after his death show his arrogance, but his radical actions did not stop there.
MPEx, founded by Popescu, is different from the crypto asset exchanges that people often use now. The trading website launched in 2012 requires users to open an account with Bitcoin and supports users to trade stocks, bonds, options and other types of securities with Bitcoin. Satoshi DICE, a well-known gambling website in the cryptocurrency circle, once issued stocks on MPEx.
Public information on the Internet shows that users needed 30 BTC to open an account at that time. When the news of Popescu’s death reached the domestic cryptocurrency circle on June 29, Beijing time, an old player in the circle said on Weibo that the platform account opening fee was 25 BTC at the time, and "Baomao stocks were also traded on it." (Baomao’s original name was Jiang Xinyu, a genius developer of the first batch of Asic Bitcoin mining machines in China. He once raised funds by mass manufacturing mining machines, but lost contact with people in the circle in 2015 and his whereabouts are still unknown.)
Looking back now, the scope of MPEx’s operations and its use of Bitcoin as a settlement method are quite radical. In March 2014, Popescu revealed that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) required him to disclose detailed information about MPEx users and at least one securities issuer. As expected, MPEx became the subject of an SEC investigation for providing securities listings and transactions that were not approved by regulators, and the subsequent suspension of operations was most likely related to this. Mircea Popescu is speculated to hold tens of thousands of bitcoins. Despite this, Popescu's support for open source projects still makes him respected in the industry. When the open source operating system Open BSD, which came out in the 1990s, encountered funding problems, Popescu donated $20,000 in 2014 to maintain the operation of the non-profit foundation behind the software. This operation is also one of the technologies used by MPEx.
"Popescu is one of the earliest and most ambitious entrepreneurs in the field of Bitcoin technology. He is famous for founding MPEx... and he has no shortage of fun publicly undermining the power of the SEC." Pete Rizzo, editor of Bitcoin Magzine, recalled in an article that Popescu has since become one of the first people to publicly combat scams and is a public critic of Ripple and Bitcoin Savings & Trust, the latter of which was later found to be a pyramid scheme.
Pete Rizzo believes that this novel behavior won Popescu an early following, and he was later labeled as "a radical and unapologetic Bitcoin preacher, which has made his influence enduring despite his documented sexism, bigotry and anti-Semitism." He commented that Popescu was also influential because he believed that software must remain backward compatible and avoid hard forks, and he asserted that Bitcoin must ultimately be defined by users' software choices, not any one development team.
Popescu was both conservative and radical in his role as a Bitcoin evangelist, or in other words, he adhered to the fundamentalism of the Bitcoin white paper in a radical way. Now that he has passed away, the outside world has focused more on the future of the Bitcoin he held.
There are only two possible outcomes. If Popescu always keeps his Bitcoin private key private and secure, then the assets he controls will forever "sleep" on the Internet after his death; if someone else holds this wealth, the possibility of selling it will become a crisis that will impact the market.
Popescu's death once again leaves the Bitcoin world with a mystery. (Beehive Tech) |
