Man loses $ 557 million in bitcoin after mom throws away laptop

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After taking a $ 70 punt 11 years ago, this man says he was sitting on a gold mine. Then his mother made a very costly mistake.

Bitcoin trader claims he lost A $ 557 million worth of crypto when his mother threw away her broken laptop.

The anonymous poster on the / r / bitcoin subreddit said Bitcoin “ruined his life” as the revelation of his lost fortune struck home.

This is just one of the uplifting tales from the crypto world, reports The Sun.

He claimed to have bought 10,000 Bitcoin in early 2010 as a punt, spending around £ 50 (A $ 70) after being convinced by his college roommates – storing the keys on his laptop after transferring them from a USB key.

When he graduated and started living his life, he finally forgot about the coins.

But in 2014, as cryptocurrencies gained traction, the 25-year-old claimed he remembered his purchase and returned to pick it up thinking he might be sitting on a massive fortune as the Bitcoin’s value was exploding.

And then when he got home to try to find his old laptop – which had been broken for years.

He says he discovered that the device had been thrown away by his mother.

His 10,000 Bitcoins are now worth A $ 557 million.

“I literally passed out, I was angry, confused, shocked, in denial, sad, enraged and so many other emotions,” he wrote in a post in 2019.

The poster – which has since disabled his Reddit account – claims the horrific misfortune left him suffering from “mental breakdown” and depression because “every day” he remembers he could be a multimillionaire.

He claimed he even felt resentment towards his mother when he criticized her for throwing out the laptop, which had been sitting in a pile of “untouched trash” for years.

And despite his attempts to get his life back on track, he said the rising value of Bitcoin only made his depression worse.

“I’m still broke, I still live with my parents, I’m an employee, but in an amazing job I hate and have friends, but we don’t talk much, and life is everything just not the same was.

He added that the thoughts always made him “sick to the stomach” and described it as a “long-winded nightmare”.

Some Redditors wondered if her story was true, but the anonymous user insisted it was correct in the comments section.

And its lost hiding place is just a drop in the ocean worth an estimated A $ 185 billion of the highly volatile cryptocurrency now stuck and inaccessible in the online ether.

The price of bitcoin continues to fluctuate as the volatile cryptocurrency plunged last week to just 50% of its all-time high – hitting lows of just A $ 38,000.

Its story follows the story of “Bitcoin Pizza Guy”, who spent A $ 463 million worth of Bitcoin on Papa John’s, a crypto trader who lost A $ 371 million in coins by forgetting his password, and a woman who found out she had spent A $ 929,000 worth of Bitcoin on weed and MDMA.

In his post, the Redditor wrote: “I could have had the most epic life and the most epic story to tell how my riches came to be, but it never happened. my life is on a downward slope, I am severely depressed and I feel so shit everyday.

“Things are not the same as they were before and will never be the same because bitcoin ruined my life, or maybe I let it ruin my life, [I don’t know].

“My hopes were all high and euphoric, then right after being low and terrible in 24 hours, and it has touched me so far and will continue to weigh on me for as long as I live.

“There really isn’t a specific moral to this story, but I just wanted to talk to someone or somewhere to get my story out.

“This is the first and last time I’m speaking publicly to anyone about this, so there you have it. This is the story of how I lost 10,000 bitcoins.

He said he lived in the hope that the fluctuating and volatile cryptocurrency would shatter again and never recover to alleviate some of his pain.

Uplifting tale

Speaking of his reaction after finding out his mother got rid of the laptop, he said he lost his job because all motivation was undermined.

“I lost friends, I isolated myself from everyone and everything, including my family,” he wrote.

“I put on a lot of weight and did a lot of bullshit that I’m not proud of. My life was pretty horrible for 2014.”

He added: “As you can imagine, the fact that I thought I had between $ 5 million and $ 10 million at the time and then right after it was taken from me broke my heart.

“I have never felt so much pain and severe depression as I felt that day.”

Its story is an echo of British computer engineer James Howells who threw away a hard drive containing over A $ 370 million worth of Bitcoin.

The 35-year-old continues to beg the Newport Council to allow him to search a landfill where he believes she is buried – even offering them a fortune of A $ 102 million.

The price of Bitcoin jumped about 4% yesterday after billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk tweeted that he had active discussions regarding the sustainability of the digital coin.

It came after he caused a drop in prices last week after confirming that his company Tesla would stop accepting cryptocurrency concerns about the coin’s environmental impact.

It came as China cracked down on coin mining and Bitcoin only hit 50% of its all-time high on Sunday.

To process Bitcoin transactions, a procedure called “mining” must take place, which involves a computer solving a difficult math problem with a 64-digit solution.

For each problem solved, a block of Bitcoin is processed. In addition, the miner is rewarded with a new Bitcoin.

To compensate for the growing power of computer chips, the difficulty of the puzzles is adjusted to ensure a constant flow of new Bitcoins every day.

Ethereum, Cardano and Dogecoin currencies are also suffering, although all three remain significantly up from where they were at the start of 2021.

This article originally appeared on The Sun and has been republished with permission

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