In 2013 Wired destroyed 13 bitcoins as a part to create a news
In 2013, Wired decided to donate 13 Bitcoins but later they destroyed the private key of the Bitcoin wallet.
In the present time, the age of Bitcoin is still in the initial phase and there is a big future where Bitcoin will exist forever. At the very beginning of Bitcoin’s existence, there was a big question to understand the concept of Bitcoin and how it works.
For this, Author Robert McMillan set up a Bitcoin mining rig in the office of Wired in 2013. Through the mining rig setup, he mined around 13.34 Bitcoins. The main goal of Bitcoin mining was to understand how it works.
After mining more than 13 Bitcoins, the Author decided to donate to someone but later he destroyed the main private key of the Bitcoin wallet. The main goal of destroying the private key of Bitcoin wallets was to prove that “The world’s most popular digital currency is nothing more than an abstraction.
The author wrote in the publication:
“we’re destroying the private key used by our Bitcoin wallet. That leaves our growing pile of Bitcoin lucre locked away in a digital vault for all eternity — or at least until someone cracks the SHA-256 encryption that secures it.”
In 2013, Butterfly Labs ASIC was mining 1 Bitcoins in 5 days. And the price of one Bitcoin was around $110 only. Surely, the Author underestimated the price of Bitcoin. With the whole gain, the current price of Bitcoin is more than $57,000 at the time of writing this article.
So total value of the destroyed Bitcoin private key is around $761,000.
A sufficiently Powered PC in 2013 was able to mine one Bitcoins in 13 hours. And this time frame changed to 23 days in 2014. And a similar thing will take around 10 years to mine one Bitcoin for a PC, according to an NYT report.
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