cryptocurrency.tech
02 December 2021 15:45, UTC
Reading time: ~ 2 m
The 13 BTC mined by Wired journalists back in 2013 are now worth almost $ 750,000. However, it seems that access to the cryptocurrency has been lost forever, since the journalists decided to get rid of the private key. The journalists’ wallet has ~ 13.3 BTC. The first coins arrived at the address back in December 2013. At the time of this writing, the value of the cryptocurrency in the wallet is estimated at ~ $ 756,000.
Journalists mined BTC as part of an advertising experiment for a miner from Butterfly Labs. The mining of the cryptocurrency went through the mining pool of the Eclipse Mining Consortium. Then the farm gave out from 4.86 to 6.15 Gh / s. Such capacities, as Wired wrote, turned out to be enough to mine just over two bitcoins in ten days. In fact, this meant that it took a little more than a week to pay off the farm, since such a volume of cryptocurrency at that time was estimated at ~ $ 220, and the farm itself cost $ 274.
Initially, the journalists planned to spend the mined bitcoins for charity, but later decided to completely destroy the private key of the wallet.
“It [уничтожение приватного ключа] leaves our growing pile of bitcoin jewels locked in digital storage for all eternity. Or at least until someone breaks the SHA-256 encryption that protects it, “Wired wrote.
However, the loss of 13 BTC is still far from the well-known 10,000 BTC payment for a pizza. Let us remind you that the first purchase with the help of bitcoin was pizza. In May 2010, a user named Laszlo bought two pizzas for 10,000 BTC. Translated into dollars, this amount did not exceed $ 40. At the current exchange rate, two pizzas already cost ~ $ 1 billion.
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