Man buys $27 of bitcoin, forgets about them, finds they're now worth $886k
Kristoffer Koch invested 150 kroner ($26.60) in 5,000 bitcoins in 2009, after discovering them during the course of writing a thesis on encryption. He promptly forgot about them until widespread media coverage of the anonymous, decentralised, peer-to-peer digital currency in April 2013 jogged his memory.
Bitcoins are stored in encrypted wallets secured with a private key, something Koch had forgotten. After eventually working out what the password could be, Koch got a pleasant surprise:
I had 5,000 bitcoins in there. Measuring that in today’s rates (2013) it’s about NOK5m ($886,000)
Now its 14M