Ever lost thousands of Bitcoins? What's about 9,000 of them? Here's a story of one, very unfortunate guy who managed to lose 8,999 Bitcoins, 10 years ago and never got back to them again. At today's price the loss is bigger than $100,000,000. At least now the loss of a few bucks at (put your favourite chitcoin) isn't that bad.

Ten years ago, user named Stone Man created a new thread on BitcoinTalk.org -  Lost large number of bitcoins

Here are the details.

1) Bought 9,000 BTC on one of the exchanges over time.
2) Transferred them to my client running on a linux live CD distro of Debian.
3) Backed up the wallet file to a flash drive.
4) Sent 1 BTC to myself
5) Closed client before any confirmations
6) Shut down system (wiped system disk loaded into memory and therefore the ./bitcoin folder
7) Loaded system back up
8) Copied old wallet.dat file into ./bitcoin folder
9) After some confirmations appeared the balance was 1 BTC and there was a transaction saying I spent 8,900 BTC to an address I did not recognize
10) I read on the forum threads that people have had problems like this but it seemed only when they were trying to double-spend by sending coins to another address and reloading an old wallet file


Is there anything I can do?

I do have the address that the 8,900 were supposedly sent to but the old wallet file is gone for good.

Thanks,
Stone Man

...as you can see, he created a wallet and loaded it with 9,000 Bitcoins

Blockchain link to the address: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/157PiPgqphedUvrco3mKU3Xoof7yzhj9pW

He send 1BTC to his own wallet just to see if everything's working as it should.

Transaction: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/eb5b761c7380ed4c6adf688f9e5ab94953dcabeda47d9eeabd77261902fccccf

As you can see, the change* (8,999 BTC) went to another wallet

https://www.blockchain.com/btc/address/167ZWTT8n6s4ya8cGjqNNQjDwDGY31vmHg

*When you do a Bitcoin transaction you always spend all of the coins in the address, part of the money goes to whoever you're paying, and there rest is returned to you as a new 'change' address. This helps your anonymity (pseudonymity) as someone watching cannot be 100% sure which amount you spent and which amount you still keep in your wallet.

The problem (10years ago) was that there was only one option to keep an access to your wallet - backing up the wallet after every transaction. Nowadays, we have seeds that we can keep written on a paper or even washers like https://SAFU.ninja and no matter how many transactions we do, we always are able to open our wallet, using the exact seed all the time.

This 10 years old sad story also reminds us how secure Bitcoin actually is. There is literally more than 100 million USD sitting and waiting for someone to hack in and take it all. No one managed to do it. Looking forward Bitcoin price going over $100K to see if One Trillion Dollars will motivate anyone to hack into the wallet even more.

As for the poor guy "Stone Man", I certainly hope he didn't turn his back on the Crypt world and bought some more Bitcoins to laugh about this story. One way or another, I'm pressing F to pay my respects**.

** The origin of "Press F to Pay Respects"

Thank you guys for reading, liking, following, and tipping. Extremely appreciated! 👍