While he was young, Mark Michaels — an electronic engineer from Pretoria, South Africa — minted 20 BTC, which was almost insignificant at that time.
Fast forward today, with Bitcoin’s prices rising higher compared to when it was launched, those once almost insignificant 20 Bitcoins are now worth $940,000, almost a million dollars.
But unfortunately, Michaels has lost both his key and password for his BTC wallet, in other words, he lost the chance of having a big fortune from his minted Bitcoins.
Crypto kid
In a time when nobody was paying attention to cryptocurrencies, Michales was already a fan of cryptos. In fact, when he was still in 7th grade, he was already searching about Bitcoin, when almost no one was interested in it.
“I believe I used the original Bitcoin wallet software, which required a wallet key and password to access,” Michaels said.
During that time, the young Michaels continuously worked for weeks just to mine Bitcoin, and through his consistent efforts, he was able to acquire 20 BTC. What’s more interesting was that the value of Bitcoin at that time was a mere $0.0008.
The $940,000 mistake
Michaels mindlessly stored his Bitcoin wallet’s key and password in a text document, without hoping that he might use it soon. This file was unintentionally deleted when he was deleting his computer files one day.
But at that time, Michaels wasn’t concerned about this mistake, as BTC was almost worthless during that time anyway. But fast forward a few years later, when Bitcoin started to hit $1,000 valuation, that’s when he started to attempt to retrieve his deleted files.
But unfortunately, even with all his attempts to recover his deleted files, they have failed as the computer where he stored his Bitcoin key and password has been formatted multiple times.
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