Peter Todd named Satoshi on HBO, MT. Gox payment plan deadline extended, and more: Hodler’s Digest, Oct. 6

The main news of the week

MT Gox pushes payment plan deadline to October 2025

The discontinued crypto exchange Mt. Gox extended the deadline to pay creditors by a year, pushing back the deadline to repay the money to October 31, 2025.

According to the official announcement, “many rehabilitation creditors still have not received” their payments after not completing the necessary procedures.

The platform was one of the first crypto exchanges in the world and at one point handled 70% of all global Bitcoin transactions. It faced a series of security breaches and overlooked data records that locked out nearly 127,000 users, halted withdrawals, and eventually collapsed in 2014.

Nigerian court denies bail to Binance exec despite health concerns

A Nigerian court has rejected the bail request of Binces executive Tigran Gambarian, citing health problems. The court ordered the prison to send him to a hospital for treatment.

Judge Emeka Nwite of Nigeria's Federal High Court in Abuja rejected Gambarian's bail request on October 11, according to a report by Bloomberg.

Nwit reportedly decided to keep the Binance executive in jail despite his deteriorating health. [prisoners] Getting Out of Jail”

The judge said Gambria would only be allowed to be released “if the detainee's continued stay has caused harm to others and isolation has not been found.”

A former FTX executive was scheduled to appear in prison after a judge denied the request.

After several legal attempts to report back to prison after a seven-and-a-half-year sentence, former FTX Digital Markets CEO Ryan Salame could be released from prison as soon as October 11.

On October 10, U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan for the Southern District of New York denied Salame's request to begin serving his sentence on December 7 instead of October.

The former FTX executive said there were medical reasons for him to remain a free man for two more months, but Judge Kaplan cited previous delay attempts and Salameh's recent behavior.

US attorneys argued that the former FTX executive “appeared in person” at the Sept. 12 hearing and took time to appear on The Tucker Carlson Show, an online talk show, for an interview.

Vitalik Buterin was seen as a dark horse for the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics

Economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, creator of the Marginal Revolution blog, recently made their picks for who will win the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics.

The conversation came up on the Oct. 8 episode of the duo's Marginal Revolution podcast.

In what Cowen called an “unusual choice,” given the opportunity, he chose Ethereum founder and computer scientist Vitalik Buterin.

When he and his collaborator Tabarrok discussed their views on the merits of theoretical economics, the two agreed that Buterin deserved the prize because “he did something in monetary economics.”

By Cowen:

“Vitalik built a platform, created a currency, disproved Mises' regression theorem in the process, obviously following in Satoshi's footsteps, but my goodness, what does one have to do to win a Nobel Prize?”

Peter Todd named Satoshi Nakamoto in the HBO documentary

An HBO documentary aimed at outing Bitcoin's anonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, has identified Canadian Bitcoin Core developer Peter Todd as the cryptocurrency's creator.

Cullen Hoback — producer of HBO's Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery Documentary — confronted Todd and Blockstar CEO Adam Temelz to conclude that Todd is Nakamoto.

The documentary ends with Todd saying, “Okay, I'm Satoshi Nakamoto,” in response to a confrontational question from Hoback.

Again, this “admission” does not prove that Todd is the creator of Bitcoin. He is known for invoking the phrase “I am Satoshi” in support of the original creator's right to privacy.

Todd publicly denied being the creator of Bitcoin prior to the documentary's premiere, and questioned Hoback's conclusions after clips of the documentary were released online before its premiere.

Winners and losers

At the end of the week, Bitcoin (BTC) at $62,754, Ether (ETH) at $2,440 and XRP at $0.54. According to CoinMarketCap, the total market cap is $2.19 trillion.

Among the top 100 cryptocurrencies, the top three altcoin gainers for the week were FirstNero on Ethereum (NEIRO) at 65.79%, dogwifhat (WIF) at 20.29% and Uniswap (UNI) at 17.92%.

The top three altcoin losers of the week were Stacks (STX) at 10.74%, Beam (BEAM) at 9.44% and Aptos (APT) at 9.21%. Be sure to read Cointelegraph's market analysis for more information on crypto prices.

The most memorable quotes

“Looking forward, we are prepared to return 100% of the bankruptcy claim amount plus interest to non-state creditors in what is the largest and most complex bankruptcy estate divestment in history.”

John J. Ray III, CEO and Chief Operating Officer at FTX

“With no founder type, it helps it feel more like a discovery than a startup or an innovation. Right. So I think that's good for the Bitcoin concept.”

Adam Temeles, CEO and co-founder of Blockstream

If you start introducing new low cap memcoins every few days as a big account to your followers. [because] You don't have an edge, so you have to use your followers instead.

ZachXBT, blockchain explorer

Investors are looking for a new price range to reactivate supply.

James Cheek, lead analyst at Glassnode

“The application of traditional investment strategies can yield very high returns in crypto because the market is less efficient.”

Edward Chin, CEO and founder of Parataxis Capital Management

“I would argue that one of the many tragedies of the current regulatory system is that not only do good actors go after them, but fraud and bad actors are at an all-time high. […] They just ignored those.

Chris Dixon, Andreessen Horowitz General Partner

Forecast of the week

US election results won't stop Bitcoin from hitting $100,000: Dan Tapiro

The results of the US election won't change the bullish direction of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which could hit $100,000 per coin, said Dan Tapiero, founder of 10T Holdings.

“I really don't think it matters. Everything is increasing now. The choice will pass,” Tapero said of Bitcoin during a panel discussion at the Licenseless Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah.

“Bitcoin is a proxy. [for cryptocurrency generally]And I believe that relatively soon and others will lead to $100,000. [assets] It will follow,” said Tapiero.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump — who has said he wants to make the U.S. “the cryptocurrency capital of the world” in November's U.S. presidential election — has been relatively quiet on the industry, along with Democrat Kamala Harris.

FUD of the week

86-year-old man to pay $14 million after admitting to running crypto Ponzi scheme

The 86-year-old former California attorney was sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to pay nearly $14 million in restitution.

In a sentencing Oct. 8 by Judge Gloria Navarro in Las Vegas federal court, David Cagel was sentenced to one count of wire fraud after pleading guilty in May.

Cagel is in hospice care at a nursing home in Las Vegas due to illness. He will complete his probation unless he can get out there, in which case he will be required to wear a restraint device.

State prosecutors who indicted Kagel last year allege that between December 2017 and June 2022, Kagel and two accomplices fraudulently lured victims into investing in a crypto bot trading scheme that promised high profits and no risk.

The FBI has been accused of violating the MIT license for the use of smart contract code

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been accused of violating the terms of the MIT license with smart contracts.

On October 10, X user 0xCygaar, an AbstractChain contributor, publicly accused the agency of using OpenZeppelin's libraries—an open source code resource—without properly including the required license holder.

If proven, this omission could be a violation of copyright law, as the MIT license requires any significant use or modification of the code to include the original license.

The X user warned the FBI to “take necessary action against these […] F.B.I.”

The lawsuit centers on the FBI's failure to include the MIT license notice when using the OpenZeppelin library, which is widely used to create secure smart contracts.

The MIT license regulates the use of blockchain technology, specifically in the Ethereum ecosystem. It allows for distribution, modification, and free use as long as the original license terms are respected.

He is said to be running away after touching the ankle bracelet.

A man under house arrest allegedly involved in a $180 million cryptocurrency fraud scheme is on the run after his ankle bracelet was stolen, New York prosecutors said.

Horst Jicha, the former CEO of crypto mining and trading firm USI-Tech, is believed to have “interfered with his ankle bracelet” on October 4 and “escaped in violation of his pretrial conditions,” according to an October 10 court filing.

The Pre-Trial Service alerted the government 12 hours after the Jicha bracelet stopped working.

Jiccha, a German, was arrested in Miami, Florida on December 23, 2023, for the first time in more than five years after he entered the United States on vacation.

The best magazine stories of the week

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Crazy Satoshi Podcast Created in Seconds, Crypto + AI is bigger than memecoins: AI Eye

AI + Crypto tokens have increased by 2X more than memecoins in the last month, and people still believe in deep fakes of AI after being exposed.

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Cointelegraph magazine writers and reporters contributed to this article.