How Human Error Resulted in the Loss of 7,500 Bitcoins

Human error has been the culprit behind many losses of traditional money. Whether from carelessness, forgetfulness or simply simple human oversight, it’s inevitable to commit such mistakes. And mistakes like that also extend to the digital currency.

James Howells’ story is a fine example of this, according to The Merkle. In 2009, he had mined over 7,500 Bitcoins (BTC) over the course of one week. “There were just six of us doing it at the time,” said Howells, an IT worker who is now investing in crypto. He compared the early days of Bitcoin mining to the gold rush of the 1800s.

After mining the cryptocurrency, Howells stored it in a hard drive, which was then stashed into a drawer containing yet another data storage device.

For some reason, he decided to throw away one of the hard drives and, as you might have guessed, he grabbed the one containing his passcodes needed to retrieve the 7,500 Bitcoins. It was only four weeks later that he realized what he had done.

Howells said he did the initial calculations and felt sick when the numbers returned. He even went to the landfill and told the people there that he’d lost millions because he threw away his hard drive. “They looked at me stupidly,” the crypto investor said.

Fast forward four years later and his digital currencies were worth $2 million to $3 million. But other things occupied the IT worker’s mind.

Passcodes or private keys are security measures of the Bitcoin algorithm that usually have more than 50 characters in them. This code is a mandatory requirement for the retrieval of cryptocurrencies and will not permit access to the stash of coins to anyone who doesn’t have it.

As of this writing, Bitcoin’s value is at $7,472, which means Howells’s 7,500 BTC are valued at $56,040,000. There are over 15 million BTC mined to date, with the digital coins estimated to reach a finite number of 21 million.

But Howells's story pales in comparison to Matthew Mellon’s, heir to the Mellon banking fortune. On April 16, a drug-related heart attack took the life of the scion and was unable to share his pass keys to his family. The fortune that’s said to be in XRP cryptocurrency is estimated to be around $1 billion, according to the Daily Mail.