Ask HN: What's the most expensive mistake you've ever made
[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/64idzl/digitalocean_accidentally_deleted_production/
[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/64idzl/digitalocean_accidentally_deleted_production/
I kicked off the bitcoin processes let it all fan out to every node, and went to class. Coming back to check on it before I left University that day. I made a mental note to myself about how many "coins" it had ground out of the clusters CPU time and placed in my "wallet", with all the importance one might place on remembering the exact number a computer got on a geek Bench score. If memory serves, it was something around 25,000 bitcoins.
At their peak value, that works out to in excess of 30 million US dollars worth of mistake due to lack of desire to back up the results of my idle experiment. To be fair at the time, they were worth less than nothing, I vaguely recall some mention of them 'possibly in future being used as a medium of value exchange' and that sort of abstract thing, and I was running the software out of curiosity. So I'm not bitter.
I was fortunate enough to have a boss was pretty understanding, and I was not fired, though I genuinely felt he would have been justified in doing so.