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How WIRED lost $100,000 in Bitcoin (wired.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Back in 2013, the halcyon days of at-home Bitcoin mining, staffers in the WIRED San Francisco office turned on one of Butterfly Labs' mining machines and let it whir away, amassing a horde of 13 bitcoins -- now worth $100,000. But today we have nothing to show for our efforts. What happened to our loot?
The same thing that has happened to millions of other unfortunate miners, actually: We lost our private key, a 64-digit string of random numbers that not one of us remembers. And we've got basically no chance of recovering it: "Originally I was going to say that the closest metaphor I have is that we dropped a car key somewhere in the Atlantic," says Stefan Antonowicz, WIRED's then-head of engineering. "But I think it's closer for me to say we dropped the key somewhere between here and the Alpha Centauri."
The same thing that has happened to millions of other unfortunate miners, actually: We lost our private key, a 64-digit string of random numbers that not one of us remembers. And we've got basically no chance of recovering it: "Originally I was going to say that the closest metaphor I have is that we dropped a car key somewhere in the Atlantic," says Stefan Antonowicz, WIRED's then-head of engineering. "But I think it's closer for me to say we dropped the key somewhere between here and the Alpha Centauri."
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