Ouch! :eek:
So that’s what internet pirates do with their ill-gotten gains!
I guess he should have made a treasure bitmap!
‘404’ takes on a whole new meaning.
“The Bitcoins…are buried under…a…‘W’…”
Now worth $3.5 million. 
I love the way that everything that happens in Britain gets datelined “LONDON”. This guy doesn’t even live in England!
The dateline of an article usually refers to the place where the story was written or filed. It doesn’t necessarily refer to where events occurred. It’s possible that the author of this article didn’t even leave London to write the story.
If there’s a part of Britain that isn’t London (and I’m a bit skeptical on that) then I don’t want to know about it.
Yeah, eat my shit, all you (imaginary) people outside the M25.
If you’re going to stick it in a drawer, maybe that’s the sort of thing you might want to put a Post-It on…
Possibly this weird notion of “data backup” is worth a look.
If it were possible to make 7500 bitcoins in a week - on a 2009 laptop - everyone would be millionaires. A modern computer designed for the task would be lucky to make more than a few hundreths of 1 bitcoin per day. It’s beyond dubious that he had even 1 bitcoin in a week.
I thought that the algorithm was designed so that it gets gradually harder to mine the coins, so that it was much easier to do so in 2009. That might explain why he had so many of them.
It’s a wild world.
Or it’s a Madˆ5 World.
He’d still have to mine about 50 of them per hour, on a laptop. I can’t really see how that’s feasible, since it would mean those who were actively mining in 2009 would have millions of bitcoins.
And there probably weren’t that many of them doing that. I never heard of bitcoins until 2011, during that first spike of media interest.
It would be interesting to know the difficulty of mining the first few bitcoins.
The first block of Bitcoins awarded to the first miner was a block rewarding 50 bitcoins. Now, I don’t know how long it took to mine a block back then at difficulty 0 - but it seems they were tiny little blocks, and they were being mined every few seconds (it looks to take several minutes these days).
Yeah. Plus, each time you make a copy, there’s another $7.5 million!
There were probably very few people doing it at the time and most were probably like him. They were doing it out of idle curiosity and abandoned it for various reasons over time. There may be many people who are now regretting deleting files or tossing drives.
If anyone mining bitcoins back then didn’t spend them, then they might have a lot today. But who expected them to be worth a thousand dollars each back then? (It’s like a stock that’s increased tremendously in value over the years; you’d be a millionaire, if you bought early and never sold the shares.)