After taking a $70 punt 11 years ago, this man says he was sitting on a goldmine. Then his mum made a very costly mistake.
A bitcoin trader claims he lost crypto now worth A$557 million when his mum threw out his broken laptop.
The anonymous poster on the /r/bitcoin subreddit declared the Bitcoin “ruined his life” as the revelation of his lost fortune hit home.
It’s just one of the cautionary tales from the world of crypto, The Sun reports.
He claimed he purchased 10,000 Bitcoin in early 2010 as a punt, spending around £50 (A$70) after being convinced by his college roommates – storing the keys on his laptop after transferring them from a USB.
As he graduated and started to get on with his life – he eventually forgot about the coins.
But then in 2014 as cryptocurrencies gained traction the now 25-year-old claimed he remembered his purchase, and went back to look for it thinking he may be sitting on a huge fortune as Bitcoin’s value boomed.
And then when he went back home to try and find his old laptop – which had been sitting broken for years.
He says he discovered the device had been tossed out by his mum.
His 10,000 Bitcoin would now be worth A$557 million.
“I literally fainted, I was angry, confused, shocked, in denial, sad, raged and so many other emotions,” he wrote in a post in 2019.
The poster – who has since deactivated his Reddit account – claims the horrific misfortune left him suffering a “mental breakdown” and suffering from depression as “every day” he remembers he could be a multi-millionaire.
He claimed he even grew resentful of his mum as he blamed her for throwing away the laptop, which had been sitting in a pile of “untouched junk” for years.
And despite his attempts to get his life back on track, he said the rising value of Bitcoin just deepened his depression.
“I am still broke, I still live with my parents, I am employed, but at a s****y job I hate, and have friends, but we don’t talk much, and life is just not the same as it used to be.”
He added the thoughts still make him “sick to his stomach” and described it as feeling like a “long s****y nightmare”.
Some Redditors questioned whether his tale was true, but the anonymous user insisted it was accurate in the comments section.
And his lost stash is just a drop in the ocean of an estimated A$185 billion worth of the highly volatile cryptocurrency now left stranded and inaccessible in the ether online.
Bitcoin continues to fluctuate in price as the volatile cryptocurrency last week plunged to just 50 per cent of its record high – hitting lows of just A$38,000.
His story comes after the tale of “Bitcoin Pizza Guy”, who spent A$463 million of Bitcoin on Papa John’s, a crypto trader who lost A$371 million worth of the coins as he forgot his password, and a woman who found she spent A$929,000 of Bitcoin on weed and MDMA.
In his post, the Redditor wrote: “I could have had the most epic f***ing life and most epic story to tell of how my riches came but it never happened. my life is on a downhill, I am severely depressed and just feel so s**t everyday.
“Things are not the same as they once were and never will be the same because bitcoin has ruined my life, or maybe I allowed it to ruin my life, [I don’t know].
“My hopes were all high and euphoric then right after low and dreadful within 24 hours, and it has impacted me till now and will continue to weigh me down for however much longer I live.
“There is really no specific moral to this story, but I just wanted to vent this to someone or somewhere finally to get my story out.
“This is the first and last time I will speak out publicly to anyone about this, so there you guys go. that is the story of how I lost 10,000 bitcoin.”
He said he lives in hope that the fluctuating and volatile cryptocurrency will crash again and never recover to ease some of his pain.
Cautionary tale
Speaking of his reaction after finding out his mum had got rid of the laptop he said he lost his job as all motivation was sapped from him.
“I lost friends, I isolated myself from everyone and everything including my family,” he wrote.
“I gained a lot of weight and did a lot of dumb s**t I’m not proud of. my life was pretty horrible for the year of 2014.”
He added: “As you can imagine, the fact that I thought I had what was between 5-10 mil at the time and then right after had that taken away from me broke my heart.
“I never felt the amount of pain and severe depression I felt as I did on that day.”
His story is an echo of the Brit computer engineer James Howells who threw out a hard drive containing more than A$370 million worth of Bitcoin.
The 35-year-old continues to beg Newport Council to allow him to search a landfill where he believes it is buried – even offering them A$102 million worth of the fortune.
The price of Bitcoin jumped about 4 per cent yesterday after the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk tweeted that he was having active discussions regarding the sustainability of the digital coin.
It came after he prompted a price crash last week after confirming his firm Tesla would stop accepting the cryptocurrency concerns around the coin’s environmental impact.
It came as China cracked down on coin mining and Bitcoin sat at just 50 per cent of it highest on Sunday.
To process Bitcoin transactions, a procedure called “mining” must take place, which involves a computer solving a difficult mathematical problem with a 64-digit solution.
For each problem solved, one block of Bitcoin is processed. In addition, the miner is rewarded with new Bitcoin.
To compensate for the growing power of computer chips, the difficulty of the puzzles is adjusted to ensure a steady stream of new Bitcoins are produced each day.
The Ethereum, Cardano and Dogecoin currencies are also suffering though all three remain significantly up on where they were at the start of 2021.
This article originally appeared on The Sun and has been republished with permission
