Bitcoin is currently worth over $9,700.
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Between 2011 and 2012, 49-year-old Clifton Collins bought 6,000 Bitcoin using money he earned from growing and selling weed, reports The Irish Times. At the time, the cryptocurrency’s price varied between $4 and $6. Today it stands at over $9,700. But Collins isn’t enjoying any euphoria for the windfall — because his landlord threw out his Bitcoin codes.
The Irish Times reports that Collins was arrested in 2017 for growing and selling weed, and was subsequently hit with a five-year prison sentence. Following this, his landlord sent many of Collins’ possessions to a local dump during the process of clearing out Collins’ room. One such item was a fishing rod case, which housed a pice of A4 paper with €53.6 million ($58 million) in Bitcoin codes printed onto it.
Cryptocurrency is bought through so-called cryptowallets. Once you buy Bitcoin, the cryptowallet issues you a code that’s needed to access it. Anyone who gets that code can access and potentially steal the cryptocurrency, so buyers are usually encouraged to hide their codes somewhere safe.
In 2017, Collins spread his 6,000 Bitcoin across 12 accounts in order to guard against losing his crypto-fortune, according to the Times. He printed out the codes to his Bitcoin stash on a piece of A4 paper, the same paper he stuffed into the aforementioned fishing rod case.
The past few years have seen others lose digital fortunes even greater than Collins’ $58 million. A man in the UK accidentally threw out a hard drive storing $127 million-worth of Bitcoin codes. Gerald Cotten, owner of a Canadian cryptocurrency exchange, died of Crohn’s Disease complications in December 2018, leaving behind $190 million in cryptocurrency for which he had the only password.
In what’s likely little consolation, Collins wouldn’t have been able to cash in his Bitcoin even if the paper hadn’t been lost to the dump. Ireland’s Criminal Asset Bureau seized the cryptocurrency, on the grounds that its purchase was funded by illicit activity, reports The Irish Times.