How are the people who “throw away” hundreds of millions of dollars in digital money with their own hands?

Losing money or being hacked by hackers is enough to lose money, but some cryptocurrency owners also lose money for “falling back” reasons.

After many strong price increases, Bitcoin has made many people rich in a short time. However, there are also some cases where “I don’t understand how it is caused by evil spirits” when they “miracle” lose their Bitcoin wallets themselves.

Two identical hard drives

The man at the top of the list is James Howells – who owns an 8000 Bitcoin wallet. It happened in 2013, while cleaning the house, on a desk with 2 hard drives, one empty and the other containing thousands of Bitcoins. , James “conveniently” put his BTC wallet in the trash. The amount of BTC in the wallet currently has a market value of $181 million.

This incident changed James’ entire life. For nearly 10 years, he is constantly trying to regain his lost fortune. Until 2021, James announced a 12-month search plan with support for X-ray equipment and artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

It seemed that there was an end to what James traded, but the plan was strongly opposed by the Newport city government because of environmental concerns. Although James has offered to raise money for the city $ 76 million, the government is still keeping a ban on him digging in the trash.

Undeterred, the Welsh engineer recently revealed that he had successfully raised 11 million USD, enough for him to carry out his plan to dig up 110,000 tons of garbage in landfills across the city. Collaborating with James Howells is a team of 8 experts, robotic dogs and AI classifiers.

Forgot wallet password

German programmer Stefan Thomas is the “vice classmate” in the group of insomniacs. He has a wallet of 7,002 BTC (about 161 million USD) but he cannot remember the exact password he set up. Thomas has entered 8 failed attempts to the IronKey hard drive containing Bitcoin, and has only 2 attempts left. If wrong, his huge amount of money will forever be in the wallet.

Years later, Thomas appeared on a New York Times news page, sharing that he had calmed down about the money. Hundreds of people around the world, upon hearing this story, contacted Thomas for advice. Some referred him to a psychic, others advised him to try nootropic, a memory-enhancing drug.

However, Thomas insists he only tells the story to remind Bitcoin buyers not to make the same mistake, advising people to be especially careful with passwords to access digital currency wallets.

Bitcoin and Jail

In 2017, Clifton Collins, an Irish drug dealer, successfully hid $130 worth of illegal Bitcoins from the police.

Collins created 12 new crypto wallets and split 6,000 Bitcoins equally among them. Then, he carefully printed the account and password information on an A4 sheet of paper, kept in a fishing box at his rented house in Galway (Ireland). At the time, he thought it was a good idea, but he didn’t expect the money to end up differently.

Not long after, police arrested Collins after discovering $2,000 worth of marijuana in his car. Collins was sentenced to five years in prison and the owner decided to clean up the house, including the fishing rod container.

Follow Irish Time, the waste from the dump was shipped to Germany and China for incineration. The box was never found.

Mom threw away the old computer

An anonymous Reddit user claims to have bought 10,000 Bitcoins in 2010 for around £50 (~$60). By 2014, this person was surprised to realize that the value of Bitcoins had reached 300 million pounds (~360 million USD).

He said that he just randomly bought Bitcoin because a college roommate persuaded him. Even after graduation, he didn’t have any money left. It wasn’t until Bitcoin started gaining attention that Reddit users remembered buying 10,000 Bitcoins four years ago.

Ironically, when he returned home to find his old laptop with his account information, he discovered that his mother had thrown it out.

In a 2019 Reddit post, he said he experienced a wide range of emotions, ranging from “angry, confusion, … shock”. He said he had suffered from a “mental breakdown for a long time”.

Leave no information before you die

Matthew Mellon was ranked 5th in the list of top 10 digital millionaires in the world by Forbes magazine. Matthew is widely known to investors for holding a large amount of assets XRP (Ripple) – a coin built with the purpose of supporting transactions.

In 2018, due to a heart attack, Matthew died suddenly and passed away at the age of 54, leaving behind an XRP fortune worth more than $500 million. However, Matthew’s family had no access to the money. Because of the fact that he stores almost all of XRP in cold wallets across the US, when it is a type of cryptocurrency wallet that is not connected to the Internet.

Cold wallets maximize security, avoid risks, and require a private key to open them. But both the wallet location and the private key have so far remained a mystery to Mellon’s family.