Man Throws Away Over $8M in Bitcoins
This is a cautionary tale about both backing up your hard drive and the realities of digital currency.
James Howells got into the Bitcoin game early, not trading for them, but mining them in 2009, back when a single computer mining for Bitcoins could accumulate quite a few. (For more information on how Bitcoins are mined see this article.) And that’s exactly what happened, James Howells mined 7,500 Bitcoins and then forgot about them.
Forgetting about them is one thing, suddenly remembering they were there would have been so much better than finding cash in the dryer! Those Bitcoins just sat there on his hard drive appreciating over the last four years, but then he did the unthinkable – this last summer he threw away that hard drive. A hard drive he’d never backed up…
“You know when you put something in the [trash], and in your head, say to yourself ‘that’s a bad idea’? I really did have that,” Howells told the Guardian.
October 5, 2009 the New Liberty Standard published the first exchange rate for Bitcoins. $1USD = 1,309.03BTC So while Howells was originally mining his Bitcoins their prospect for value was fairly low; on that day his 7,500 Bitcoins wouldn’t even have been worth $6. Today with the weighted average per Bitcoin at roughly $1,070USD, that’s $8,025,000USD! The high from early in the day on December 5, 2013 was $1,240 which would have been $9.3M USD. Ouch!
The main lesson to take away from this is always backup your hard drives and never throw one out until you’re sure you don’t need anything off of it. The second lesson is for anyone dealing in Bitcoins; Bitcoins are not insured and are not tangible in the way we think of money in accounts. Howells threw out his Bitcoin Wallet, that was like stuffing his wallet full of more cash then it could ever hold and dropping it in the trash.
There is a very slim chance that someone will be able to locate the hard drive in landfill and from there a lot of finger crossing and praying will be going on in hopes that the hard drive was not damaged and the data is salvageable. Should this happen it will be headline news!
In the meantime make sure you’re backing up your data!!!
[whohit]BitcoinsTrash[/whohit]
4 Comments
Ultimately, the only reason both of these coins have so much acceptance right
now is due to exchanges that support them, and name recognition.
Bitcoin has prompted varying responses, being at once heralded as a solution to the current state of the struggling stock
market as well as a very dangerous threat to a stable economy.
This organization will help prune the chains when the ownership
of bitcoins has changed a few times.
Any particular currency has paper based, and meta based units of various denominations that represent different denominations of the currency.
This time the Danish Internet Payment System site, Coindesk,
states that 1,295 bijtcoins have been hazcked which is about $1 million.
00 back in March all the way up to $266
last month, and is currentlyy at about $115.
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