The Goxfather
Feature Film | Comedy, Crime, Drama
Based On
The article “The Rise and Fall of a Bitcoin Kingpin” by David Kushner, published by Rolling Stone
Quick Hitter
The flip side of the Lost in Translation coin. A wayward French loner – Mark Karpeles – goes to Tokyo not to lose himself, but to discover who he really is. Mark desperately wants to be appreciated for his “hacker” skills, to be regarded as brilliant, to be rich, famous, and powerful. The problem is he’s terrible at all the requirements of life as an adult. He’s an odd, emotionally stunted, unreliable recluse. Mark is perfect for life on the Internet, bad at real life. He seems destined to live out his time in Tokyo playing the card game Magic: The Gathering under a noodle shop with other lost boys who have come to Japan, until one day he trades his most valuable card – a prized “Black Lotus” – for a card trading site that is throwing off enough money each week that it could pay his rent. The site – “Magic: The Gathering Online Exchange” aka “MT. GOX” – has an extra wrinkle: it allows users to buy and sell a new cryptocurrency called Bitcoin. So Mark parts with his favorite card and quite accidentally takes over the world’s first Bitcoin exchange.
Its power to defy regulation, and make the world “free,” Mark becomes obsessed with this new currency. For someone confined by rules and norms, it’s an addictive idea. Not long after, the dark web marketplace known as The Silk Road makes bitcoin infamous... and Mt. Gox takes off, going from 1,000 users to 65,000 users in two months. The more lawmakers and media members worry about the “untraceable” and “unregulated” nature of Bitcon, the bigger the exchange gets. And the bigger Mt. Gox gets, the more the currency increases in value (going from 25 cents to $1,200 per bitcoin). Indeed, the exchange is processing 80 percent of all bitcoin and trading more than $4 million per month. The fates of both became intertwined. Bitcoin is the world’s new currency. And Mark is its king. He is both liberator and emperor, headed towards a destiny dreamed up as a child: maybe one day he would be on every computer in the world.
However, the world of Bitcoin is fraught with peril, a currency interlaced with crime from its very inception, but Mark’s desire to be seen, to be affirmed, to be something, blinds him to the risks. And when the bottom drops out one night – $473 million worth of Bitcoin stolen, resulting in the fourth-largest heist in human history – Mark’s life unravels, descending into paranoia, fear, and, ultimately, his arrest. And when the cell doors close on him, surely all is lost. Or is it?
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Status
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