Users on Reddit are engaged in a discussion about whether a man who lost $600 in Bitcoin 14 years ago would have been able to anticipate its massive future value and hold onto it despite its current worth.
Bitcoin (BTC) made its debut as a digital currency in January 2009.
Estimating the exact number of Bitcoin owners is difficult, but Chainalysis reports that over 460 million Bitcoin addresses have been generated in the past 15 years. BitInfoCharts notes that 67 million of these wallet addresses contain a balance of at least $1.
Nearly two years after Bitcoin’s inception, a user on BitcoinTalk, identified as Stone Man, shared that he purchased 9,000 BTC in a transaction.
His acquisition, valued at $600 at that time, was detailed in a post on August 10, 2010. After buying the cryptocurrency, he transferred it to his client.
He backed up the wallet file to a flash drive, transferred one BTC to himself, and then exited the client without waiting for confirmation.
Stone Man recounted shutting down his computer and erasing the ‘system disk loaded into memory and the ./bitcoin folder’ before restarting.
Upon reloading his old wallet.dat file, he noticed some confirmations, including a confirmation for a transaction of 8,900 BTC.
Unfortunately, this transaction was directed to an unfamiliar address.
“I read on the forum threads that people have had problems like this but it seemed only when they were trying to double-spend by sending coins to another address and reloading an old wallet file,” he typed.
Failing to resolve the issue himself, Stone Man sought help from others, asking if there was ‘anything’ he might do, noting that he knew the address to which the 8,900 BTC were supposedly sent.
It seems Stone Man never received a solution, as in 2020, a social media user posted a screenshot of his original message on Reddit, captioned: “10 years ago today, a BitcoinTalk user lost $600 in bitcoin. That bitcoin would now be worth $100 Million.”
In the comments, the poster included a blockchain.com link, purportedly the address where Stone Man unintentionally sent his BTC.
The cryptocurrency wallet indicates that the Bitcoin balance is unfortunately inaccessible, as the user ‘lost the private key to his wallet’.
Google’s Market Summary feature reveals that the Bitcoin Stone Man acquired for $600 in 2010 would be valued at over $808,000,000 today.
Upon realizing the extent of the user’s financial loss, many Reddit users quickly commented on the unfortunate situation.
“I am surprised he did not back up the files,” remarked one. “After all, it was worth $600 even at that time. I would play around with that much money without ensuring it was backed up.
“Obviously back then Bitcoin was in a beta mode from a wallet perspective. I guess most of the early mined coins are gone. Even Satoshi’s wallet(s) is for all purpose gone.”
Another user, who claimed to have previously read about Stone Man’s predicament, assured others that such incidents are now much less likely to occur.
“Important to know this predates HD wallets and also predates ‘keypools’ (IIRC this example may also have played a role in motivating the introduction of the latter into Bitcoin Core),” they typed.
“So, we’re in a pretty good spot today where this kind of issue (having a useless backup) is no longer a realistic problem.”
Another commenter added: “Someone hosting a pool ripped me off for 77 coins like 6-7 years ago… I still can’t stop thinking about it. Literally haunts me.”
“Let’s be real, no one who owned Bitcoin that early would have had the foresight to hold Bitcoin up until ~2017,” said another user. “Even the most bullish early investors would have probably sold at 100x.”