5 Stories About People Who Lost Their Bitcoin

It happens more often than you think

If you lose your keys you can call a locksmith to open your door or car. There are 26,000 locksmiths in the U.S., so clearly there is a need for this type of service. If you lose the private keys to your crypto wallet you are out of luck. Bitcoin, as well as all other major cryptocurrencies that came after it, is built upon public-key cryptography, a cryptographic system that uses pairs of keys: public keys, which are publicly known and essential for identification, and private keys, which are kept secret and are used for authentication and encryption.

If you lose your private keys you will not be able to authenticate that you are the owner of the wallet and you won’t be able to do transactions to move or sell your cryptocurrency. Here are five stories about people that lost their private keys and what it cost them.

James Howells And His 7,500 Lost Bitcoins

James Howells, a Welsh I.T. worker, began mining Bitcoin on a personal computer in 2009. By 2013, he had mined 7,500 Bitcoin which is worth about $56 million today. In 2013, he stopped mining and sold the computer he was using for parts on eBay. He kept the hard drive with the hope that Bitcoin would rise in value. In 2013, when cleaning his house he accidentally threw the drive away and it, along with the rest of his trash was taken to the local landfill in Newport, South Wales and buried. Asked how it ended up in landfill, he explained that it was “thrown out into a bin bag during a clear-out in a case of ‘mistaken (hdd) identity’ in summer 2013. There were two HDDs in the same drawer, the wrong one got binned? s*** happens.”

The landfill reportedly contains about 350,000 tons of waste and 50,000 more tons are added every year. An article reported that “a council spokesperson said their offices have been “contacted in the past about the possibility of retrieving a piece of IT hardware said to contain bitcoins,” but digging up, storing and treating the waste could cause a “huge environmental impact on the surrounding area.” As of 2019 he…