Wired considered donating their holdings to charity back in 2013, however instead set the “obvious” selection was to destroy the key to their billfold holding 13 BTC.
There has been no shortage of individuals and institutions that woefully underestimated the potential of cryptocurrency.
Among the ranks of once-were Bitcoin naysayers is Wired, that destroyed the non-public key to a Bitcoin (BTC) wallet holding 13.34623579 BTC back in 2013 so as to form the point the cryptocurrency was nothing over an “abstraction”. The Bitcoin within the currently inaccessible address is currently value $761,000.
Author Robert McMillan (who now is a reporter with the Wall Street Journal) started a Butterfly Labs Bitcoin mining rig within the corner of his workplace at Wired to see what all the fuss was regarding. And at the conclusion of his very little experiment, he was far from impressed.
“The world's most well-liked digital currency extremely is nothing over an abstraction,” he wrote. The journalist deliberated on what to try and do with the Bitcoin at the time, initially considering donating them to charity.
“But within the finish, the solution was obvious,” he wrote, “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.”
At the time, the Butterfly Labs ASIC was churning out a mean of 2 Bitcoin each 10 days. Wired noted within the article that 2 BTC were worth about $220 at the time. Now, they’d be worth about $57,000 each, or $112,000 for the try — a rise of around 13,000%.
In 2013, it took a mean of thirteen hours to mine one BTC using a standard laptop. By 2014, that point had fully grown to 23 days. In 2021, it might take ten years to mine one BTC per the NYT.
Even back in 2013 but, Bitcoin mining issue had been increasing exponentially. McMillan complained that it had become concerning 10 million times more durable to win the Bitcoin mining “lottery” since 2009.
( Keira Wright, Cointelegraph, 2021)