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one guy lost 9000 btc in 2010 the btc are still sitting there https://blockchain.info/address/167ZWTT8n6s4ya8cGjqNNQjDwDGY31vmHg

-Crypto Piece

Last transaction was made on 2016-01-21 and I guess the other sent fractions are just tested for burning. Do you know on who's this person or where did you got this address? That's a lot of bitcoins computing 9,000 BTC * $13,460 = it's a shining $121,140,000.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=782.5

This is the story. It sounds like it was a very easy mistake to make back in the day. These days we're spoilt for choice in terms of wallets and the protection they offer. Any one of us might have made the same balls up.

Very unfortunate but i think theres more of these mishaps that have occurred in the past and still today. People need to be careful and make sure they check the address they are sending to.

Crazy, and the poor guy didn't even do anything silly (if the second thread links to the exact same situation). And to think..  that there's many of such situations..
At least that helps with raising BTC's price for the rest of us.

I got really upset when I lost .9ETH (which may soon be worth over $1,000) testing out a new wallet. I sent that as a trial run before sending like 21 ETH over.. that would've sucked even more. I can't imagine how this guy must feel now!

Well, back then 9000 BTC cost about 900 dollars so hopefully he went straight back out and bought some more. Even then at that point in time that would've seemed like a bonkers thing to do.

Imagine what happens to Bitcoin's price, if those 9K BTC come to the stock exchange. No, let them sit there further. :D :D :D

Ouch! This was super common back in the day when Bitcoins were work like a penny. No one really cared about them. But now they are so valuable I don't see it happening nearly as much as it used to. Really sucks for that guy though......

To soot his pain I am offering him a free advertising block on my website for his crypto and/or blockchain product, service or media channel.

I see you have a cool website coming together! Might consider to give it a little boost on the opening day  ;)

Also if he did really lose it back in 2010, the value of it is really negligible and he would have not cared about it back then, but if he realized how much it has grown then he'll likely would have freaked out. Indeed it was really common back then, since the only wallet available was the bitcoincore wallet which indeed was hard to use unlike the wallets available today.

I don't understand what happened there? If he sent 1 BTC to himself, then the other 8999 should be sent to a change address for which he controls the private key. That is how the deterministic wallets work today. It is not necessary to re-backup a wallet after every transaction, right?

If that is not what happened, how did the wallets back then work? Would they generate a new change address at the time of sending? In which case there was no record of the private key?

Is he dead? Its so much. its mean that we cannot do anything with those bitcoin. May be he is already rich and do not need that. Blockchain developer must contact the person who have that bitcoin, if he dead , his family can take the money.

it's cool if now that have a wallet it sells because the price is now very high and that is 9000 Bitcoin and if calculated to the dollar of course it is very much and can be to live in the village for a lifetime

It's a pity. But how will this have happened?

Happens like this really a sad news. He may have more bit coin than before... ;)

This guy is very unlucky, he lost money is astronomical. Anyway, at least he was involved in several transactions with Bitcoin, and he was an early Bitcoin user and thanked him.

It's kind of a bittersweet story to read. One one hand it's really sad for him that this happened to him but it's also a case scenario why it's so important to understand how important it is to back up and keep your private keys stored some where you can access safely etc, it also shows how strong cryptocurrency is - yes it's a good thing no one is able to access these funds anymore it's supposed to function in this manner.

Ok so some people on here are saying it was used for fractional bitcoin burn. Others are saying it was a mistake by early bitcoin person.  If it was a mistake then i can safely say that this has got to be the worse thing i have seen happening to a person.  That will replace the pizza order with bitcoin and top with the guy who throw out hard drive with 7500 bitcoins.

Yeah, all the time people would throw away these huge piles of bitcoins. But this guy didn't even get any pizza in return. Just lost faith in a technology that would have changed his life. I wonder if he kept that 1 BTC.

Thanks for that share gentlemand and that's what I've noticed before people having the same mistake. I agree that if I'm on those days for sure that I'll commit the same mistake anyway there's no way to recover it, feeling sorry for stone man on this day.

Sadly no pizza for him. :( and I hope so he did kept it.

WOW 9000 bitcoin loss. I wonder what are the feelings of that person now.

Any time you ever see a man run out on the street and bang his own head with a frying pan you may wonder that may be the guy.

Well, he never came back to Bitcointalk after that. If he knows what's good for him he underwent hypnosis to cast the entire thing out of his mind. That would gnaw at me until I burst in a puff of acid and ate through the floor a la Alien.

I dont think this guy might be alive. Losing such a big amount just because you forgot those 12 words is really something you can take your life for.  :P Does he even know that he is a billionare today but to his misfortune can't access his funds. Its seriously the biggest loss of all time.

Just imagine and think for a second what would be of you if you have that amount of money on your wallet right now.

How your life would be? Oh my god, i can not even imagine that.

But of course that no one knows who was the real guy who lost that incredible amount of money, and we all are feeling very sorry for him.

I would not even be able to survive to it, losing 120 million dollars is something HUGE.

So basically anyone at that time could really damage the supply. Think about it. You have a rich kid that buys himself some expensive toys now and then. He gets interested in BTC somewhere along the way and decides to buy a million, then he loses all by mistake. I'm glad people weren't so careless with their coins back then.

 I don't understand how much time you have gotten that the only thing you could invest your time into are wallets that contains huge amount of bitcoin which unfortunately you can neither spend have access to just a form of wish that cannot come into fulfillment. I wonder what you would do if you have access to Satoshi's wallet that have been widely circulated to have about 1million bitcoins.

Hmm. I think they probably were. I wouldn't be surprised at some of these silly sounding estimates of lost coins being in the several million. Don't forget that production was its highest at 50 coins per block when it was completely worthless for over a year and any old donkey could mine back then. I'm sure Satoshi retained his. Dunno about the rest.

And that's even before we think of carelessly treated coins that were bought. They were still only 10 dollars a piece into 2013. 

Do you mean the owner or those 9k bitcoins? It's totally lost forever and during those times bitcoin isn't popular and isn't worth that much so it's not a loss for him before but taking a look back at the past will definitely going to hurt his feeling or even us who don't have that amount of bitcoins. He didn't forgot those 12 word recovery phrase/words, he totally wiped out his data.

This happened before deterministic wallets, which are relatively new.

At the time, the wallet would create a new, random "change" address when the transaction was created. This new address would exist only in the wallet, which would then need to be backed up.

At the time, a wallet was a collection of random addresses that would have to be backed up every time a new address was created. Now, HD wallets are pseudo-random addresses that can be recreated with one master key that doesn't change.

This means if you use an HD wallet, you can eliminate the risky effect of the change address generation, because your change addresses are already generated and stored in the HD wallet itself? So if you don't spend the whole amount of the unspent output, the change will remain in your own wallet, just on the next address, and you won't need to remember the private keys, because your seed will regenerate your HD wallet anytime you need and you will have the control all of the addresses.
Does this also mean that if you use a paper wallet, you need to import the private key into an HD wallet, not to lose bitcoins because of random generated change addresses?

Yes, that is all correct. That is why HD wallets became very popular quickly after they were introduced.

That depends on the wallet.

For example, Electrum 2.0 and later has a "sweep" function, which sends all bitcoins (less the transaction fee) in a private key (that you copy from a paper wallet) to the next address generated from the seed key.

Mycelium can import a private key (scanned from a paper wallet) into an "unrelated account", that is separate from its "Bitcoin HD" account. I don't (yet) know where the change goes when you spend from a unrelated account.

All the recommendations I have seen say to always send the entire amount when sending from a paper wallet, to avoid issues with the change address.

omg 8,999 BTC lost, the number is very much, I do not know what to do if I lose Bitcoin this much, it is a lesson to continue to be careful in doing anything...

So really you need to use leger nano s! For me it will also be a lesson in life! You can not trust yourself, It's better to do everything quality 1 time than to lose everything later... There are hackers, or you yourself will go wrong. 3 is not.

The nondeterministic wallets at that time were completely random as well? Therefore no possibility to guess/brute force it?

I just want to have a right amount so that I could purchase my own house, a car, trip abroad, pay bills, retirement funds, insurance, educational plan, passive investment like real estate, give something to the church, my parents and siblings perhaps.

He stay at comp all time and try to remember password or recovery words

it's really amazing to have up to 9000 bitcoin, I dare not dream of having up to 9000 bitcoin. I would have trouble sleeping because it has so much treasure.

It is way back 2010, he didn't know that the price of bitcoin will go up to 15k usd right now.

But If he is already know. He probably banging his head into the wall. hehe

This is a bad story. The owner might be gone mad and became insane because of this. so unfortunate.  :(

I hope they can still find a solution for this simple problem.

It's great to have that much money, but I think he wont recover teh password or none can do it.
Guys who can help him for recovering password? and how we can trust these blockchain? it is bad for anyone who lost their password and unable to recover it, so trusting Bitcoin is the biggest faulty thing for us.

This is really sad here is a huge number, just because of carelessness that he has lost what he should have owned. Now we can only watch he wallet and sad.

This is normal, because early bitcoin is not worth much, so many people forget to back up their private keys.

May be this guy stores 9000 bitcions at this wallet and wait for best time to sell it  :) cold-mind investor )))

If I had that amount of bitcoins I don't want this story happen to me lol ;D Deym that amount of bitcoin was a huge amount of money if traded to flat today and surely that guy will be living in luxury. :o

This is a funny story, just like the famous Lazlo pizza story. But probably both this guy and Lazlo had lots of other Bitcoins to console themselves later. And many many other people must have sold their coins when they were cheap. Even I have sold one big bag of an altcoin in April for 3000$ and if I hadn't now I would sit on 3 Million $... which perhaps will be 30 in 5 years time. So you see, these stories happen again and again... even to me! :)

nice

I have both Bitcoins and Litecoins stuck which I cannot use from back in 2012

The litecoins are worth around £2000 GPB  The bitcoins are only worth about £480  GPB so in total I have lost £2480 lol

Back in 2012 I really dont remember people talking about private keys,  all I remember was to keep your address and wallet password so that was all I did keep. I have even searched my hardrive for the wallet.dat files and the ones I found wont dump the private keys so they are obivously not the correct ones. We all live and learn lol

I think he is saddened to lose big BTC because actually 9000BTC at this moment is huge and can help him get everything in the world. For me everyone is wrong and this 9000 BTC will never be used

The day he cashes out, he will be the cause of the breaking of the crypto bubble