South African Loses $ 900,000 In Bitcoin After Accidentally Deleting Keys

Holding Bitcoin is only as good as long as the holder does not lose their keys. It is very important when it comes to holding to make sure that one’s keys are safe. Indeed, once the keys are lost, there is no way to recover the lost coins. This is how the Bitcoin network is secure. This is the case of a South African man who accidentally deleted the keys from his wallet which contained 20 BTC.

A report from MyBroadband follows the story of Mark Michaels (name changed), a 24-year-old electronics engineer from Pretoria, South Africa, who lost the key to his wallet containing 20 bitcoins. Michaels mined BTC 10 years ago when he was still a miner and at that time BTC was not worth much.

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Coins were still easy to mine, and Michaels had mined his loot using a personal computer equipped with an Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 graphics card. Bitcoins weren’t as easy to sell at that time. And according to Michaels, they weren’t worth much and he had lost interest because the computer couldn’t be used for much else while he was mining coins.

How he lost his keys

Michaels had returned to check his bitcoins seven years after first mining them when BTC hit $ 1,000 per coin, that’s when he realized his big mistake. Michaels postulates that he had stored his mined BTC on the original bitcoin wallet software. “I believe I used the original Bitcoin wallet software,” Michaels said. “Which required a wallet key and password to access it.”

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While the 24-year-old can’t remember exactly how long he’s been mining the coins, he does believe he mined for a few weeks to a few months. By this point, he had managed to mine up to 20 bitcoins. The entirety of the coins was only worth around 58 South African cents when Michaels mined it, which wasn’t much.

When he returned to get the parts seven years later, Michaels said he had made a big mistake. The hard drive where the file containing the parts was stored had been formatted. Efforts to recover the original files from the hard drive were unsuccessful as the drive had already been formatted and rewritten several times at this point.

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“I remember collecting all the hard drives, USB drives, CDs and DVDs in the house and going through them carefully. It took about a week. I also tried running data recovery software on my primary hard drive, but it didn’t help much. By that time, this drive had been formatted and reused several times.

Don’t quit Bitcoin

Michaels has already made his peace with this loss. Since he never got into cryptocurrency, for him it was more about being able to use cool technology. Michaels still currently owns various cryptocurrencies. Although the electronics engineer does not actively invest in crypto. It is more simply a question of “playing in the markets and seeing how things change”.

According to Michaels, he still operates cryptocurrency, but not Bitcoin. Its current mining activities are focused on Ethereum. But it is only when his platform is not in use that he uses it to mine the crypto. Michaels’ BTC would be around $ 900,000 at the current price of $ 47,000 per BTC.

Michaels' BTC would be worth ~$900,000 in today's prices | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com

Current estimates place the number of BTC lost at 20% of the total circulating supply of 18.5 million BTC. Most of this information comes from the early adopters who mostly forgot about the cryptocurrency after acquiring it due to the value of the coins at the time. Upon their return, they discovered that they had lost the keys to their wallet. A popular case of this is James howells, who had thrown in a hard drive containing 7,500 bitcoins.

Chart from TradingView.com