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An Engineer from South Africa mined Bitcoin from his home computer 10 years ago when the BTC was not worth a price. To this date, the 24-year-old boy has lost his key to the wallet and had to bear a loss of almost $900,000.
Owning a bitcoin at an early age is a pride moment but losing it too at this age is not a price for possession. To hold the bitcoin to your wallet, one thing which must be taken care of completely is to keep your key safe and secure because if this is lost, the bitcoin that you have collected will be lost forever. There will be no way to recover the lost bitcoins. This is what has happened with the 24-year-old electronic engineer from Pretoria, South Africa.
He had accidentally deleted the keys to his wallet that contained 20 BTC. He had mined this BTC 10 years ago when he was still a minor and the value of BTC at that time was not worth it. Coins were easy to mine and this engineer kid mined his loot using a home computer that had an Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 graphics card.
10 years ago, Bitcoin was not easy to sell and according to him, the value of the bitcoin was also not much worth. He had lost interest because the computer could not be used for any other purpose as it was mining coins.
The engineer from South Africa, when realized his bitcoin, went back seven years ago to check his wallet after he had first mined them when BTC had hit $1,000 per coin. This is when he realized his mistake. He said that he had stored his original mined bitcoin on the original bitcoin wallet software.
This bitcoin wallet software required a key and a password to access. While he could not recount the time for how long he mined bitcoins, he thinks he mined for a couple of weeks to a couple of months. During that time, he had managed to mine only 20 BTC. The cost of the coin was worth around 58 South African cents at that time which was not much.
When he went back seven years later to get the coins, he realized what a big mistake he had made. The hard drive where the file holding the coins was stored had been formatted. He had done everything to recover the file but all his efforts proved to be futile. It is because the drive had been formatted already and written over several times at that point.
He took almost a week trying to recover his lost BTC. But now, he has made peace with his loss. Since he never got into cryptocurrency, for him, it was more about being able to try to use cool technology. He still owns various cryptocurrencies, although he does not invest actively in cryptos. It is more just making his presence in the market and witnessing how the market is moving and things are changing.
He still mines cryptocurrency but not bitcoin. He is currently focusing on Ethereum for his mining activities. He does it only when his rig is not in use, and he uses it to mine for crypto and seeing how things change. The BTC that he lost would be approximately $900,000 in today’s price which is currently above $45,000 per BTC.
With a background in journalism, Ritika Sharma has worked with many reputed media firms focusing on general news such as politics and crime. She joined The Coin Republic as a reporter for crypto, and found a great passion for cryptocurrency, Web3, NFTs and other digital assets. She spends a lot of time researching and delving deeper into these concepts around the clock, and is a strong advocate for women in STEM.
