2009: Man Buys 5000 Bitcoins For $27, Forgets About Them. 2013: Man Rediscovers His Bitcoins, Now Worth $886,000
from the valuable-information dept
Bitcoin shares with drones the unhappy distinction of being the subject of almost exclusively negative reports. Just as
drones are usually doing bad things to people, so Bitcoins are usually helping people do bad things because of their supposed
untraceability. So it makes a pleasant change to come across
an upbeat Bitcoin story like this, as told by the Guardian:
Kristoffer Koch invested 150 kroner ($26.60)
in 5,000 bitcoins in 2009, after discovering them during the course of
writing a thesis on encryption. He promptly forgot about them until
widespread media coverage of the anonymous, decentralised, peer-to-peer
digital currency in April 2013 jogged his memory.
In those four years, his Bitcoin holding had become worth around
$886,000 -- a rather nice gain on the original outlay. But the real
moral here is not, as it might appear, that you should rush out and buy
Bitcoins in the hope that they will be worth fabulous sums in a few
years' time -- the continuing fluctuations in Bitcoin's value and doubts
about its underpinnings make that a very
risky proposition. Rather, the key thing to note is the following:
Bitcoins are stored in encrypted wallets secured with a private key, something Koch had forgotten.
Fortunately for him, Koch did manage to remember his password. But just
imagine how he would have felt if he hadn't been able to recall his
private key, and had meanwhile discovered that he had $886,000 worth of
Bitcoins that he couldn't access. So the real moral here is this: make
sure you back up all your passwords -- even the ones you think you'll
never need again -- just in case.
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