A small mistake with daunting consequences. The fact of owning 9 000 bitcoins (BTC), this is clearly no longer allowed to everyone. Even with the crypto market in the midst of a gloom currently, this still represents close to 194 million dollars. It is however the quantity of bitcoins that a person a perdue overnight. Luckily for his sanity, it was in 2010but his anecdote is still relevant today.
Losing $600 is annoying, but imagine $194 million!
In the year of grace 2010where Satoshi Nakamoto was still watching over his very young project Bitcoinsome early crypto-enthusiasts were already making mistakes with their private keys the wallet.
At that time, 9 000 bitcoins were worth in the 600 dollars. Nothing to do with 2022 therefore, but it already represented a sum that might be infuriating to lose. It is, however, the sad story that happened to a certain « Stone Man »who recounted his blunder on the forum BitcoinTalk August 10, 2010.
Entitled « Lost large number of bitcoins » (loss of a large number of bitcoins), his message reports what turns out to be the destruction definitive 8,900 bitcoins (actually: 8 999 BTC).
Bitcoin popularized the importance of cryptographic private keys
To sum up the fatal gait from Stone Man above. He explains that he first bought 9,000 bitcoins on one of the very few exchanges of this pioneering era. He then transferred them to son wallet Bitcoin, of which he knew public key and private key thanks to the file wallet.dat.
Except that he then performed a transaction of 1 BTC to its own public address. When the transaction was completed, all bitcoins were ” expenses “ : 1 BTC went to his address, and the other 8,999 to a new address which was automatically generated once the transaction was validated by the blockchain (which takes around 10 minutes maximum on Bitcoin).
And, except bis, which he then turn off your computer without waiting for blockchain validation. Computer that was under Linux boot CD. In this precise momentthe 8,999 bitcoins were forever lost. Indeed, its file backup wallet.dat of its bitcoin wallet client, although saved on a flash disk at the start of the operation, had become partly obsoleteand will not include not the private keys (and therefore access) to the address that received the 8,999 BTC! Only the access of the 1 BTC of the initial address…
He is statistically impossible that one day someone by chance generates the same private keys that allow access to these nearly 9,000 bitcoins. This story reminds us that we must always be very careful with your private keyswhether they are on a hardware wallet like those of Ledgeror whether they are in the form of a 24 word passphrase noted somewhere.
Don’t make the same horrible dumpling: familiarize yourself with the exciting world of cryptocurrencies and come create an account on Binancethe reference Bitcoin and crypto exchange (commercial link).
