When Mt. Gox, the largest bitcoin exchange at the time, suddenly closed its doors in 2014, 850,000 bitcoins belonging to customers and the company were missing.
The value of those coins was over $450 million at the time. But at today’s prices, they’d be worth close to $11 billion. Where did they go? And will they ever be recovered?.
The answer to the first question is easy: we don’t know. The second question is harder to answer.
Mt. Gox claimed that it had been hacked and that the hackers had stolen the coins. But many people didn’t believe that story, myself included.
I thought that Mt. Gox had simply run out of money and had used customer funds to cover its losses.
Whatever the case may be, the fact remains that those coins are gone and no one knows where they are.
But all is not lost…literally.
While it’s true that the Mt. Gox coins are gone, there are other lost bitcoins that have been recovered.
In fact, there are a few ways to lose bitcoins and then later find them again.
The most common way to lose bitcoins is by simply forgetting about them. If you have a bitcoin wallet on your computer or mobile device but you never use it, chances are you’ve forgotten about it.
And if you’ve forgotten about it, there’s a good chance you can recover your coins.
There are a few companies that specialize in recovering lost or forgotten bitcoins. They usually do this by scanning old blockchain data for addresses that have a balance but haven’t been used in years.
If they find an address with a balance, they assume that it’s been abandoned and try to contact the owner (usually through social media). If they can confirm that you are the owner of the address, they will help you recover your coins.
Another way to lose bitcoins is by sending them to the wrong address. This can happen if you type in an incorrect address when making a transaction.
It can also happen if you send bitcoins to an address that belongs to a different cryptocurrency (ethereum for example). In both cases, the coins are not actually lost; they just need to be sent to the correct address in order for you to access them again.
If you’ve sent bitcoins to an incorrect address, there is no way to recover them yourself; you will need help from the recipient of the funds (assuming they still have access to those funds). The same is true if you’ve sent bitcoins to an address belonging to a different cryptocurrency; you will need help from someone who has access to that other blockchain in order to retrieve your funds.
Lastly, bitcoins can be lost due to hardware failure or damage (just like any other digital asset). If your hard drive crashes and you don’t have a backup of your wallet file, your coins will be gone forever.
The same is true if your wallet file becomes corrupted or damaged in some other way; unless you have a backup, your coins will be lost forever.
Fortunately, there are ways to recover lost or damaged wallet files (assuming they haven’t been overwritten by new data). There are also ways to recover wallets from hardware failures (assuming the hardware itself hasn’t been destroyed).
But these methods require technical knowledge and skills; most people would not be able to do it themselves without help from someone else who knows what they’re doing.
In conclusion, while it is possible for people to lose their Bitcoin and never get it back – there have been multiple cases where people have managed.