An Australian man has recounted his story to local media of losing what would today be more than a seven-figure dollar sum of bitcoin, stressing that such should serve as a warning against storing one’s bitcoin’s keys on a cheap storage device.
Also Read: Australian Tells Story of Throwing Away Hard Drive With 1400 Bitcoins
Alex Mined Bitcoin in Late 2009
When Alex began mining bitcoin, he was doing so out of technological curiosity and did not think that bitcoin would see meteoric price gains. Alex recounts “In the tech community we didn’t think bitcoin would be that big,” stating that he “got into [mining] just for fun… It was just applying our PC hardware to a global network, something novel. In the early days of GPU [graphics processing unit] mining, a single card could mine quite a few coins per day.”
Alex chose to store his wallet file on his USB stick, and did not think about his bitcoins until discovering that the price had reached nearly $1000 USD in 2013. After scrambling to find the storage device, Alex states he “[plugged] the USB stick back in to try and access the file, but the stick died. It was one of those cheap made-in-China ones,” he said.
“If My Wife Knows, I’m Dead”
Alex’s approximately 1000 bitcoins would be worth more than $9 million USD at current prices. He describes the debacle as the “Worst mistake of [his] life.” Alex states “The thinking was that it’s offline, not on my PC, so in case something bad happened to the PC — [if] it blew up, or [was] hacked — I still had a backup… Never back up anything on a cheap Chinese-made disk or USB stick.”
Despite the bumpy start, Alex has persevered with cryptocurrency. Alex states that he mined “a lot” of Ethereum at the start of the year, adding “One day, maybe Ethereum might restore what I lost with bitcoin.”
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