$940,000 worth of Bitcoin’s private key lost by a African guy

A South African engineer revealed his mistake to lose private key to Bitcoin. If he can access his Bitcoin private key then he can live a life as a millionaire.

Mark Michaels is a 24-year-old electronic engineer. He lives in Pretoria, South Africa. When he was in the seventh standard then he was doing research and getting knowledge about Bitcoin.

As this story is 10 year old, so at that time price of Bitcoin was around $0.0008/BTC. And also at that time no one platfrom were available to sell Bitcoin assets easily. Even no another coin except Bitcoin was in existence. Because that was a very early stage of the crypto world.

Mark did mining of Bitcoin through his PC to understand how Bitcoin technology works. After a few weeks of the mining process he made around 20 Bitcoins. As the price of Bitcoin was very low and also not many platforms were available to sell Bitcoin directly, Mark saved his Bitcoin in a wallet and also saved the private key of the wallet in a document.

Once, Mark was cleaning his PC then mistakenly deleted his private key of Bitcoin. 

When the price of Bitcoin hitted first time to around $1000 then Mark made his first attempt to recover his wallet but he found himself failed.

According to Mark Michaels, if he remains able to access his Bitcoin wallet then he can be a millionaire easily. But unfortunately this was a huge mistake by him.

Moral of the story is to keep your private key safe at more than one place where no one can touch/smell your private data even by mistake.

Read also: Swedish authority forced to return 33 Bitcoins to a criminal