The South African, who received 20 bitcoins (BTC) more than a decade ago when his flagship cryptocurrency cost less than a cent, lost it all, according to the report.
According to the Mybroadband report, a person under the alias Mark Michaels bought 20 bitcoins while studying in seventh grade.
Michaels, now 24, reportedly used a personal computer equipped with an nVidia GeForce GTS 250 video card to mine bitcoin.
“I don’t remember exactly how long I lasted, but it was consistently from a few weeks to a few months.”
During the year Michaels took out BTC, the price of its flagship cryptocurrency rose from just $ 0.08 to $ 0.0008, according to the report.
At the time of writing, bitcoin was trading at $ 44,590, the current value of which is 20 BTC, more than $ 890K.
The report also says Michaels kept mined bitcoin in its flagship original cryptocurrency software.
“I think I used the original bitcoin wallet software, which required a wallet key and password for access.”
Michaels said he backed up his wallet’s private key and password to a text document on his computer, but deleted the document when he cleaned up the device. Attempts to save Bitcoin were futile when it became active at $ 1,000, seven years after Michaels first issued it.
“I remember putting together all the hard drives, memory cards, CDs and DVDs in the house, and I decisively examined each one. This lasted about a week.
I also tried running data recovery software on my main hard drive, but this didn’t work out much. By then this drive had been formatted and reused several times.”
Michael, who is now a qualified electronics engineer, currently owns small amounts of various crypto assets, according to the report. He says he sometimes takes out Ethereum.
“I’m not actively investing in crypto. It’s usually just to play Sundays and see how things change.
I still have Ethereum when my current installation is not in use,
