Every field and industry has its own stories. Some of these stories are happy, cheerful while others are full of sadness and sorrow. Bitcoin is no different. It has a mixture of noticeable stories from the users around the globe. These are the five unbelievable stories of Bitcoin.
$27 yields a million
A Norwegian man named Christopher Koch was working with his thesis about encryption. During then he got introduced to Bitcoin and its unknown functionalities. He was amazed with its workings and eventually decided to buy some. He spent $27 to buy 5,000 Bitcoins in 2009. Later he forgot about them and eventually when Bitcoin started to come up in news he checked his wallet and found everything was in one piece. At today’s rate they are close to $3.3 million. Koch later exchanged some of his bitcoins and bought a upper-end apartment in the most expensive area of the Norwegian capital.
The most expensive hard drive ever
James Howells from Wales, UK has been mining bitcoins since 2009 when it took no extra hardware to mine big. At one point he had 7,500 Bitcoins. One day he accidentally spilled lemonade on his laptop which contained the wallet with the coins. To clean everything up he took the laptop apart and kept the hard drive in his drawer for almost 3 years. Later in the summer of 2013 he threw away that very hard drive along with other stuff while he was cleaning up his room. Well, 2013 turned out to be the year when bitcoin reached the highest value. When Howells heard about the price he searched for a backup copy in all his storage devices. He couldn’t find any. At the rate back then he lost over $8 millions. He was even thinking to search the landfill for the hard drive but later realized how complex it would be. Even in today’s value as of right now those 7,500 bitcoins stands at close to $5 millions.
The $11.5 million pizza
On 22 May 2010 a programmer named Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 bitcoins to a user at Bitcointalk forum for two Papa John’s Pizzas. Back then Bitcoin was relatively new and the price was just $0.0025 per coin. He paid roughly $25 for the two pizzas. Almost 3 and a half years later when the bitcoin’s price reached the all time record at $1150 per Bitcoin in December 2013, the 10,000 bitcoins of Laszlo would be $11.5 million. So in one way he paid the biggest amount for buying pizzas ever recorded.
Ram upgrade costs 17,000 BTC
In 2011 when bitcoin was gaining fame outside internet, the first Polish exchange “Bitomat” launched their operations. In a very short time it became the 3rd largest Bitcoin exchange worldwide. It was hosted in the Amazon Web Service’s EC2 cloud servers which run on instances for providing high power computing compared to storage. At one point when the owner was adding more RAM for the server he didn’t know that the process will restart the instance while removing all data with it. Eventually that was exactly what happened. Every user’s wallet in the exchange and the master wallet’s data file was deleted during the restart. Moreover there was no backup of the server. This small slip caused a loss of 17,000 Bitcoins which are equivalent to over $11.2 millions today.
The youngest Bitcoin profiteer
During 2012 Erik Finnman on his 14th birthday got $1,000 gift from his grandmother. At that time Bitcoin was creating a lot of buzz online. Finnman took a chance with it although many people thought it to be a scam. He invested the $1,000 from his birthday and bought Bitcoins. Then almost a year and half later he sold his Bitcoins for $100,000. He used the money to launch Botangle.com, an online tutoring platform.
Source: Altcoin Today