I Threw Away $4.8M in Bitcoin

These stories always make a big assumption: That if he had not trashed it, he would have held onto it until it was actually worth $4.8M.

The reality is that he (and everyone else) very likely would have sold out around $5k and proceeded to tell everyone who would listen how they made a killing with bitcoin.

Its a "stock exchange" story that usually just factors down to "if only I'd done a rare and risky thing that no one else in their right mind would normally do (that only occurred to me because of an accident and with the benefit of hindsight), why, I'd be a millionaire now!"

I mean, while I feel his pain and understand the compulsion to look at it like he threw away $4.8M, at the point he realized what he'd done, it was worth about $4k. He could have bought them back for $4k at that point, and the lost $4k would be a rounding error. He even mentions he might have sold it at that point because he could have used the extra $4k.

It's really no different than any other situation where you had a potential gain you passed on. If I'd put all my savings into TSLA @ ~ $25 in '11, I'd have an 1100% return. But I didn't.

You actually only lost out on $4k worth of BitCoin. As you stated yourself, a few months later when you remembered that you threw the drive away with the current value at $4k, you said you could have used the money then. It's safe to assume that if you still had the bitcoin then, you would have attempted to sell at that price.

Also, regarding the proof of ownership for the drive, if found, do you still have the receipt or conversation about purchasing the bitcoin in the first place? Tax wise, you should always keep that when purchasing collectibles to have proof of your cost basis, in the U.S. at least. Not sure about other countries regarding capital gains like taxes. But if you had proof of purchase, I'd say that would hold up strong if the drive was found, at least for the value derived that text file. Your account holding the value is not in your harddrive, it is on the bitcoin blockchain, you just lost your key to get the bitcoins stored in it. But at the same time, once you throw something away, it is assumed you have given up all rights to it, thus the person who finds it now has all rights to any information on the drive, including your private key.

By the same logic, every one in the world who could have bought one kBTC when it was cheap but did not (i.e., more or less every single human in the world) has thrown away $4.8M. Even the OP wasted much more than $4.8M, because they might have bought more than 25$ worth of BTC. There is no difference between a lost investment or an investment that never happened, when the return is so ridiculously high.

You actually threw away $25 worth of bitcoin

I think everyone that jumped into bitcoin early on has a similar story. I had a few hundred bitcoin and when shops started integrating with bitcoin I bought stupid things off of sites like Overstock. Now I have worthless things and those bitcoin would be worth so much more.

Bitcoins or not, who the hell throws out a working hard drive?

Easy to think about this now, but the truth is that at some point along the line he would have sold it much less money.

This story has reached almost mythological status. Every time Bitcoin is at a local maximum, it makes the rounds.

So is the total number of bitcoins 1400 smaller now that the cold storage wallet doesn't exist?

"Don't beat yourself up for not acting irrationally." ~Anonymous