An Irish drug dealer has lost acces to a bitcoin fortune worth millions of euros after the access codes were reportedly sent to a landfill site.
Clifton Collins, 49, wrote the private keys to digital wallets containing 6,000 bitcoin onto a sheet of A4 paper, which he hid in a fishing rod case in early 2017.
Collins, who is originally from Dublin, was arrested later that year and jailed for five years for cannabis-related offences. His landlord subsequently cleared many of his possessions from his house and sent them to a landfill site in County Galway.
According to the Irish Times, who first reported the story, workers at the dump remembered seeing discarded fishing gear, however waste from the site is sent to incinerators in China and Germany.
At current exchange rates, the fortune is worth €54 million (£45m).
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1/8 Satoshi Nakamoto creates the first
bitcoin block in 2009
On 3 January, 2009, the genesis block of bitcoin appeared. It came less than a year after the pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto detailed the cryptocurrency in a paper titled ‘Bitcoin: A peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’
Reuters
2/8 Bitcoin is used as a currency for the first time
On 22 May, 2010, the first ever real-world bitcoin transaction took place. Lazlo Hanyecz bought two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins – the equivalent of $90 million at today’s prices
Lazlo Hanyecz
3/8 Silk Road opens for business
Bitcoin soon gained notoriety for its use on the dark web. The Silk Road marketplace, established in 2011, was the first of hundreds of sites to offer illegal drugs and services in exchange for bitcoin
4/8 The first bitcoin ATM appears
On 29 October, 2013, the first ever bitcoin ATM was installed in a coffee shop in Vancouver, Canada. The machine allowed people to exchange bitcoins for cash
REUTERS/Dimitris Michalakis
5/8 The fall of MtGox
The world’s biggest bitcoin exchange, MtGox, filed for bankruptcy in February 2014 after losing almost 750,000 of its customers bitcoins. At the time, this was around 7 per cent of all bitcoins and the market inevitably crashed
Getty Images
6/8 Would the real Satoshi Nakamoto please stand up
In 2015, Australian police raided the home of Craig Wright after the entrepreneur claimed he was Satoshi Nakamoto. He later rescinded the claim
Getty Images
7/8 Bitcoin’s big split
On 1 August, 2017, an unresolvable dispute within the bitcoin community saw the network split. The fork of bitcoin’s underlying blockchain technology spawned a new cryptocurrency: Bitcoin cash
REUTERS
8/8 Bitcoin’s price sky rockets
Towards the end of 2017, the price of bitcoin surged to almost $20,000. This represented a 1,300 per cent increase from its price at the start of the year
Reuters
The bitcoin fortune, which is spread across 12 online accounts, was allegedly amassed in late 2011 and early 2012 using cash obtained by crowing cannabis.
The Irish Criminal Assets Bureau is monitoring the wallets, however it has no way of accessing it without Collins’s private keys.
Private keys are made up of a string of letters and numbers that are designed to be deliberately hard to remember. The alphanumeric code is the only way to access a bitcoin wallet and it is impossible to spend or transfer the cryptocurrency without it.
A 2017 study by digital forensics firm Chainalysis estimated that nearly four million bitcoin have been lost forever, representing around 20 per cent of the total number that will ever exist.
Collins’s lost fortune is not the largest to have diappeared. In 2013, Welsh IT specialist James Howells made headlines after accidentally throwing away a computer hard drive containing 7,500 bitcoin.
In an interview with Newsweek in 2017, when the price of one bitcoin was approaching $20,000, Mr Howells said he was “pretty Zen” about the misplaced cryptocurrency.
“I have good days and bad days, but overall I’m good,” he said. “Anyway, no point crying about it.”
