South African loses bitcoins worth nearly $1 million

A young man from Pretoria (South Africa) lost access to a wallet containing 20 BTC mined ten years ago, according to MyBroadband. At the time of writing, the value of the bitcoins he lost is around $980,000.

A 24-year-old electronic engineer Mark Michaels [name changed] said he mined cryptocurrency while still in school. For this he used a computer based on an AMD Phenom X3 processor with 512 GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 graphics card.

\”I can’t recall exactly how long I mined for, but it lasted from several weeks to a couple of months continuously,\” Michaels recalls.

In the end he grew tired of it, since the computer could not be used for other tasks, and the cryptocurrency was virtually worth nothing. Moreover, Michaels did not find any way to sell it.

During that year the price of the first cryptocurrency rose from $0.0008 to $0.08.

Then he lost the paper medium containing the key and password to the Bitcoin wallet, and at some point, while cleaning the computer, he deleted the data file.

Around seven years later, when the price of the cryptocurrency had already reached $1,000, Michaels made his first attempt to access the mined coins.

\”I remember gathering all HDDs, memory cards, CDs and DVDs in the house and carefully examining each of them. It took about a week,\” he said.

Michaels also tried to recover data on the main hard drive using special software. However, by that time the HDD had been formatted several times and the attempts yielded no result.

According to him, he has come to terms with the loss of assets.

\”There are different stories similar to mine that illustrate the risk and potential benefit of early adoption of new technologies,\” the engineer added.

According to Chainanalysis, about 20% of mined bitcoins are in lost or forgotten crypto wallets.

As reported, a resident of Newport offered authorities $72 million for excavations of the landfill where his hard drive with 7,500 BTC ended up.

In the search for the HDD he intends to employ artificial intelligence.