Unbelievable Stories of Lost Bitcoin Fortunes

It isn’t uncommon to lose your keys. And when you do, you can call a locksmith to open your door. In fact, there are over 28,000 locksmiths in the US, showing just how much of a market there is for this service! But what do you do if you lose the private keys to your crypto wallet? Or you lose the hard drive where all your Bitcoin is stored? Well, unfortunately, as the following stories show, you’re out of luck!

As of 2021, roughly 20% of all Bitcoin is either lost or in wallets that can no longer be accessed. While it is very common to store all your Bitcoin in one place, like on a hard drive or in a digital wallet, these stories are a stark reminder of how much of a risky thing it can be, perhaps not too dissimilar from placing a big straight bet on a single number in a game of roulette. In the following cases, the risk certainly didn’t pay off, and it just shows how privacy and security can end up being a double-edged sword.

James Howells and the ‘mistaken (hard drive) identity’

In 2009, James Howells from Newport in Wales began mining Bitcoin and by 2013, he had mined 8,000 Bitcoins, storing them all on one hard drive. That very same year, he made the most expensive mistake of his life. Thinking he was disposing of a blank hard drive during an office clearance, he inadvertently threw away the hard drive that contained these 8,000 Bitcoins. Along with the rest of his trash, this hard drive was taken to a local landfill and buried.

Nine years later, when James realized how much the value of Bitcoin had shot up – as of today, 8,000 Bitcoins are worth over $181,000,000 – he became a man on a mission, desperate to recover his lost treasure. He came up with an elaborate plan, asking the local Welsh authorities to let him carry out a high-tech treasure hunt, which would cost $11 million, to excavate the landfill and look for the buried Bitcoins. At the time of writing, the council has still not been persuaded.

Stefan Thomas’s Iron key lock-out

In 2021, Stefan Thomas, a German programmer living in San Francisco, made waves in the crypto world for forgetting the password of the hard drive that contained the private keys to his digital wallet. This wallet contains 7,002 Bitcoins, which, at one point, were worth $220 million.

He has been trying, although unsuccessfully, to log into the hard drive since 2012, after losing the paper with his password, and, as of 2021, he was down to his final two attempts. Unfortunately for Thomas, the hard drive, known as the Iron Key, is specially designed to be impervious to all attacks. It provides users with ten password attempts before it seizes up and encrypts the contents, permanently locking them out of their fortune forever.

While Thomas claims he has since made peace with his loss, citing that he doesn’t want his self-worth to be defined by how much money is in his bank, he continues to receive suggestions and advice from people all over the world. Perhaps one day he will give his final two remaining shots a go.

Matthew Mellon and the missing $500 million

A prolific crypto investor and billionaire, Matthew Mellon was especially noted for his investments in Ripple and XFR, with banking in his family name – he was the direct descendant of Judge Thomas Mellon, founder of the Mellon Bank.

In April 2018, Matthew Mellon was on his way to check himself into drug rehab to deal with his addiction to opioid pain pills. However, the 54-year-old heir to the Mellon dynasty never made it to the rehab facility, and was unexpectedly found dead in a hotel room after apparently suffering a heart attack.

At the time of his death, the vast majority of Mellon’s assets – an estimated $500 million – were locked up in XRP, a cryptocurrency. Unfortunately for his family, Mellon had apparently never shared the location of the digital keys or cold wallets needed to access this digital fortune. To make it even more impossible, the cold wallets are apparently scattered around the US, in the vaults of various banks, inaccessible to anyone other than himself. As a result, it appears as though this staggering fortune is lost forever.

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