Forgot your wallet password, Bitcoin gone. (Image: Visual Generation / Shutterstock)
The 24-year-old electronics engineer from South Africa could earn around one million US dollars from his ancient Bitcoins nowadays. The catch: he lost the key and password for his Bitcoin wallet. He had saved both in a text document on his desktop. At some point he deleted the file while cleaning up his computer.
In Michael’s defense, to say that he has the 20 Bitcoin on you built PC in the nursery when he was about 14 years old. At that time its inventory was worth around 60 cents and there were no crypto exchanges.
“I think I have the original Bitcoin wallet software that required a wallet key and password, ”he told South African tech magazine Mybroadband.
I’m bored because there wasn’t much else to do on the PC while it was mining, and the Bitcoin that was being mined was practically worthless, ”says Michaels. He lost interest.
Recovery attempts fail
About seven years later Bitcoin had risen to $ 1,000. Michaels remembered his 20 BTC and wanted it back.
“I remember collecting all the hard drives, memory sticks, CDs and DVDs in the house and carefully searching every single disk. That took about a week. I also tried running data recovery software on my main hard drive, but it didn’t do much good. At this point the hard disk had already been formatted and reused several times. ”
Michaels has meanwhile – so he says – come to terms with the loss. He has now heard of many similar fates and describes himself as too far ahead of his time. Such things could happen to early users of new technologies.
Data from the crypto service provider Chainalysis could prove him right. According to this, around 20 percent of all Bitcoin worldwide have been “lost” or are in stranded wallets. Michael’s story is bad, but the story of the programmer Stefan Thomas is far worse.
