Myths and legends surround the whereabouts of lost Bitcoin. Unsurpassed, however, is the allegedly eternally destroyed BTC assets of Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. A short story about the curiosities of cryptography.
Cryptography nice and good. But what if one loses his private key out of carelessness? Bad luck. That's just how easy it is. The SHA-256 hash function is a good thing for security in the Bitcoin network. It is not for nothing that SHA stands for "Secure Hash Algorithm".
And with security, Nakamoto really did. Both bitcoin mining and the mathematical link between public and private key are based on SHA-256. And that's really bombproof: there are more options for private and public-key combinations than atoms in the universe. Key collisions are mathematically excluded.
It is more likely to find a gold coin sunk in the Atlantic than to guess by chance a suitable private key.
Ergo: The likelihood of finding lost Bitcoin keys tends to zero. What can be considered a disaster for the individual Bitcoin enthusiast leads to strange stories. Here are five cases about lost BTC.
. James Howells kafkaesker fight against the garbage
Right at the beginning a classic. Do you remember the guy who wanted to dig in a dump to Bitcoin? His name is James Howells and he has since changed sides. Apparently, he now holds the bar for Bitcoin Cash:
At the time, Howells (or one of his colleagues, so to speak, did not know) sank a hard drive of 7,500 neatly mined BTC on a Welsh landfill. Since then, the software developer has been making headlines with his persistent struggle against the authorities in his community of Newport. Because instead of sticking his head in the sand, the computer engineer started to search the landfill for his treasure. So far without success.
. Wired voluntarily destroys 13 BTC
The story of Wired is similarly absurd . The technology magazine even dedicated a veritable reportage to the story of 13 lost Bitcoin. And it goes like this: Obviously, the editorial team of Wired 2013 got an ominous equipment from Butterfly Labs. The square black box soon turned out to be Bitcoin Miner. It's easy to forget, but Bitcoin Mining was not dominated from the beginning by giant farms near the Arctic Circle.
At that time you could still go with the home computer on Bitcoin hunting. You did that until you had 13 BTC together. It did not take long, however, to ask the question of how to use the coins. Various proposals were in the room and for lack of more meaningful alternatives, the Wired editors decided to destroy the coins. "Ouch!", It certainly escapes many in the face of today's equivalent value.
In contrast to the former asset, Wired did not accidentally destroy his 13 scraped BTCs, but on purpose. Fully aware that the coins might one day have a "six or seven figure value," says Michael Calore, editor of the engineering department at Wired.
Whether the editors regret their drastic step today? One can only speculate.
. Elon Musk also does not know where his BTC left off
Whether Elon Musk only wants to Mars or even "to the moon", you do not know until today. The technology fanatic and series entrepreneur Musk made many hints in this direction in the past. Whether and what cryptocurrency he holds, but nobody knows until today.
However, a tweet in November 2017 has made it known that a friend sent him some crypto money at the time. However, he does not know where the satoshis came from.
Musk's relationship to the crypto scene is based on a kind of flirty distance anyway. Only last autumn, the Tesla founder made a joke, and imitated the scam-scam that had just become bigger, in which promo accounts of prominent people promised free tokens. Without further ado, Twitter blocked Musk's account - contributing to the amusement of the same.
. User confuses network fees with transaction volume
If someone has ever wondered if there is an upper limit on transaction fees, please refer to the following story. Spoiler: does not exist. The next story goes down in the annals of the most curious Bitcoin transactions in the history of the currency. It is about the most expensive transfer in the network.
In 2016, this user's Tweet @ActualAdviceBTC caused a stir:
it appears some idiot sent 0.0001 BTC with a 291.241 BTC minus fair instead of the other way around. RIP bags. https://t.co/8rb1VY1e3g
It seems as if sending BTC to an unknown wallet, everything went wrong that could go wrong. The user has shipped Bitcoin for the equivalent of about five dollars - and paid fees in the current equivalent of a state-owned detached house.
Vice had prepared the story back then, but could not bring much to light about the background. It remains to be recognized that Bitcoin aims as a peer-to-peer currency on the personal responsibility of the users. Errors - if they are in this case - can not be undone.
. Satoshi's fortune
Legends and myths surround the whereabouts of Satoshi Nakomoto's Bitcoin fortune. Neither one knows anything about the whereabouts nor the height of the credit of the Bitcoin-creator. It is rumored that the white paper author once owned up to one million BTC - the legend said that he had destroyed the private key.
One million BTC is a BitMEX investigation , but a bit too high. So much BTC even the Bitcoin Pope would not have been able to mine. The authors estimate the fortune of the richest Bitcoin owner at around 600,000 to 700,000 BTC.
Does Satoshi have a million bitcoin?
Although this could have been around 700,000 bitcoin. 1 million bitcoin may be overestimated https://t.co/KReJ1e78yw pic.twitter.com/RkE8khEA8S
However, with all the speculation, one thing is clear: If the Bitcoin dad ever decides to move or even sell his digital treasure, it will trigger an earthquake in the scene.
