In 2013, Wired destroyed the 13 BTC key worth $ 760,000 …

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There has not been a shortage of people and institutions that have terribly underestimated the potential of cryptocurrency.

Wired, which destroyed the private key of a Bitcoin wallet (BTC) containing 13.34623579 BTC in 2013, is among the ranks of former Bitcoin opponents in order to argue that the cryptocurrency was nothing more than ” abstraction ”. Bitcoin at the now inaccessible address is now worth $ 761,000.

Author Robert McMillan (now a Wall Street Journal reporter) set up a Butterfy Labs Bitcoin mining rig in the corner of his office in Wired to see what it was all about. And at the end of his little experiment, he was far from being impressed.

Full points for being ahead, zero points for judicious choices.

“The world’s most popular digital currency is really nothing more than an abstraction,” he wrote. The reporter deliberated on what to do with Bitcoin at the time, first considering donating them to charity.

“But in the end, the answer was obvious,” he wrote, “we are destroying the private key used by our Bitcoin wallet.”

“This leaves our growing pile of Bitcoin earnings locked in a digital vault for eternity – or at least until someone decrypts the SHA-256 encryption that secures it.”

Back then, the Butterfly Labs ASIC was producing an average of two Bitcoins every ten days. Wired noted in the article that two BTCs were worth around $ 220 at the time. Now, they would be worth around $ 57,000 each, or $ 112,000 for the pair, an increase of about 51,000%.

In 2013, it took an average of 13 hours to mine a BTC using a regular PC. In 2014, this deadline was reduced to 23 days. In 2021, it would take 10 years to mine a BTC according to the NYT.

Even in 2013, however, Bitcoin’s mining difficulties had increased exponentially. McMillan complained that it has become about 10 million times harder to win the Bitcoin mining ‘lottery’ since 2009.

Related: Bitcoiner Loses Almost $ 100,000 BTC In Wallet Transfer Bungle

Reddit user the Martinx pointed to the article in a post yesterday, writing that the whole debacle shows “how we’ve come a long way since 2013”. But many other users weren’t so forgiving, like Cappy2020, who commented “serves them well for being so arrogant,” adding that “even if you thought Bitcoin was just” daydreaming “, at least keep it. in case you could possibly be wrong. “

BakedPotato840, meanwhile, wrote:

“It is not surprising to find articles from the past to have this opinion on Bitcoin. The real ones who deserve criticism are the people who still hold these opinions today.”

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