A young electronics engineer from South Africa decided to delete a text document holding crypto wallet keys and passwords, which contained approximately 20 bitcoins. According to the engineer, a customized personal computer with an AMD Phenom X3 CPU and 512 MB RAM was used to mine the missing money over ten years ago.
The 24-year-old engineer Mark Michaels, according to a Mybroadband report, began to mine the cryptocurrency once he read about it on the internet. The engineer was only in the seventh grade at that time.
Although the article cites Michael’s saying that he doesn’t remember how long it took him to mine the BTC. However, he notes that bitcoin’s value was still well below the one-dollar threshold (0.08 dollars per BTC). The low price and the lack of crypto exchanges to sell the BTC finally led to a loss of interest for the then-teenage Bitcoin miner.
He said:
“I remember collecting all the hard drives, memory sticks, CDs and DVDs in the house and carefully going through each of them. This took around a week. I also tried running data recovery software on my main hard drive, but this was not of much use. By then, that drive had been formatted and reused multiple times.”
Now Holds Insignificant Quantity of Cryptocurrencies
Some seven years after the file has been deleted, the engineer would try to retrieve the lost bitcoins. At that time, the bitcoin price had risen to $1000. The report recounts the young engineer’s initial attempts. But ultimately failed in his effort to recover and access the coins.
Despite the loss of bitcoins – which now amount to more than $900,000 – and the failure to retrieve them. The programmer claimed he has since made a peaceful choice about his hurry. He also says that he has never made any money with cryptocurrencies.
The Mybroadband report reveals that the young engineer now holds many cryptocurrencies, although not in significant quantities.
