A British man says he accidentally threw away over $80 million worth of bitcoin. James Howells, an IT worker from Newport, claims to have unintentionally dumped 7, bitcoin in mid He is now. Dec 20, · Now, with bitcoin's value hovering just above $17, Wednesday, according to digital-currency website CoinDesk, Howells' 7, lost bitcoins are worth more than $ million. CoinDesk's Bitcoin. Here are the top three worst Bitcoin horror stories of all time: 1. The spring cleaning mistake Back in , IT worker James Howells lost 7, Bitcoins after he accidentally disposed of an old hard disk which contained his private key.
Stories of lost bitcoin
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Join the discussion. Join the discussion Create a commenting name to join the debate Submit. Reply Delete 0 0. Cancel Post. The technology magazine devoted real coverage to a story about 13 lost BTC. It says:. The square, black box soon turned out to be a Bitcoin Miner. This was done until they had like 13 Bitcoin in total. Wired never destroyed the 13 Bitcoins by accident — it was planned.
Some time ago, the technology enthusiast and serial entrepreneur, Elon, made many hints in this kind of direction. Currently, no one knows, the type of digital currency Elon holds. In a tweet, a friend sent cryptocurrency funds to Elon.
Elon started fighting the scam that had started emerging, whereby fake accounts were promising people free cryptos. Rumor has it that the white paper author, Nakamoto, once owned up to around 1,, Bitcoins — though legend also says that he damaged the private key. Bitcoin owners who've passed away account for some of the inaccessible Bitcoin. One Reddit user recently found an old computer belonging to his late brother, who owned Bitcoin —but the device's hard drive was missing.
Although it's impossible to say exactly how much Bitcoin has been directly lost as a result of negligence or plain misfortune, it is likely to be in the tens of thousands at the very least. According to a June report by blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, around 3. Crypto data firm Glassnode estimates that about 3 million Bitcoin are lost forever. A large chunk of Bitcoin has also been intentionally sent to one of various 'burn addresses'.
These are essentially Bitcoin vanity addresses with no known private key, which means that any BTC sent to the address is likely gone forever. Over the years, a number of burn addresses have been used for a variety of purposes, including the 1CounterParty address which was used as part of Counterparty's Proof-of-Burn event. But as Bitcoin's price breaks records this bull run, there's some indication that those 'lost' coins may turn up after all.
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