Technology
PUBLISHED
A man in the UK has become a millionaire overnight, after managing to access a Bitcoin wallet that had been left untouched for 12 years.
If you've been paying any attention to cryptocurrency news (a perversion) over the last decade or so, you are likely aware of one man who managed to lose his Bitcoin wallet containing millions of dollars' worth of cryptocurrency.
In 2013, James Howells of Newport, Wales, UK, threw away one of his old hard drives, not realizing that it contained around 7,500 Bitcoins.
Though cryptocurrency is pretty volatile, today that would be worth around $596,380,000, explaining why the man is so determined to root around in everyone's old garbage at the landfill where it ended up in order to try and find it.
But for a day of reckless spring cleaning (this is why you shouldn't clean), he would be richer than it is necessary for any human to become. That man's cryptocurrency remains lost, and will presumably never be found again, unless you include "by rats".
Then there is Stefan Thomas, a man who was paid 7,002 Bitcoins to complete an animation explaining "what is a Bitcoin" back when they were worth around $2 each.
Being more security conscious, Thomas placed the Bitcoin on a hard drive that self-destructs after 10 incorrect guesses. Having forgotten the password, a fairly detrimental error, he is now down to two guesses in order to access Bitcoin worth around $557,865,000.
Again, despite offers from hackers to help crack open the hard drive in return for a share of the wallet, the Bitcoin remains inaccessible, and unless he remembers he set it to something like "Password1!" there's a reasonable chance that coin will be lost forever too.
But we're sure it'll cheer up both former owners and users of cryptocurrency to hear of a third human who has been reunited with his digital money after over a decade.
"Chris" (his full name has not been released for anonymity reasons) invested £1,500 (~$2,000) in Bitcoin back in 2011 after being convinced by a friend it was going to take off. Chris did this through the platform Intersango, formerly known as Britcoin, where his Bitcoin was stored.
The Bitcoin exchange ran into trouble, and in 2014 Chris attempted to remove his funds, then worth around $5,400, but found that his account had been frozen.
“It was a bit of a shock when it happened. It wasn't really money that I wanted to lose,” Chris told LBC.
Unfortunately for Chris, there wasn't much that he could do about it, with the company not under the remit of the Financial Conduct Authority (the UK financial services regulator). Nothing, that is, except watch the value of his inaccessible Bitcoin rise and rise and rise and dip and crash and rise again.
“It was a punch in the stomach watching Bitcoin go up and up. After a while, I stopped watching it because I thought: 'there’s no point, it's lost'," he added.
But earlier this year, Chris's wife encouraged him to reach out to a firm specializing in recovering lost cryptocurrency. It turns out that this is a lot easier of a task than remembering your old password or searching through a gigantic dump, because within months the firm had been able to return Chris's money to him.
By then, it was worth around £3.3 million ($4,480,000), a more modest sum than that lost by the others, but still enough to make your eyeballs pop out and turn into dollar signs.
Chris reportedly plans to take out some of his money to invest in a bigger house, to help accommodate his mother-in-law's disabilities, whilst the rest remains invested in Bitcoin. He checks it on a regular basis, just to see if it's all there.
