>It's interesting to think about though. You can easily throw away a pile of cash, but never half a billion. The volume would be too big, you would notice. But a bitcoin wallet of the same street value fits on a micro SD, it could literally fall through a hole in your pocket.
It's not exactly same thing, as you obviously won't lose something like that if you already realise its value. It's more along the lines of throwing out painting from your neighbor and he becomes world best paid artist in 5 years.
Still interesting and scary to think that individual can basically "destroy" irreversibly any amount of savings by forgetting the keys/ sending it to wrong address and that can be done with 1 click.
> Still interesting and scary to think that individual can basically "destroy" irreversibly any amount of savings by forgetting the keys/ sending it to wrong address and that can be done with 1 click.
That's exactly why any large values of bitcoin ought to be stored in multisignature wallets, 3-of-5 offering pretty robust resilience to loosing a key or two. In that case, you need three different signatures to move any money, so no single click accidental failures. Time locking funds can also prevent user mistakes, as no one can move the coins until the lock time is reached on-chain.
"Florida man accidentally time travels back to 1077 to try to make some cash on early Apple Computer investment, presumed living among native Americans now"
The painting part incidentally happened to my partents.
They had a friend who was basically giving away his paintings but nobody wanted them (they were horrifying, Coraline-style, and actually a picture of his mind).
He even wanted to create a paining roll with similar horrors when they were painting their apparment.
He was a very good friend but the paintings were to much.
Then he died and a few years later his paintings prices hit the roof (various hundreds of thousands of euros). My parents are still glad to not have had the paintings because they were giving them nightmares :)
The thing is, if you lost your share certificate, but could still prove to the registrar that you were the legitimate owner of those shares, there's a good chance you would get them back. Likewise, if you accidentally burned a bunch of banknotes, but had sufficient fragments remaining to prove your ownership, your central bank is likely to be able to recompense you. That's one of the consumer-friendly features of centralised systems, which is considered a bug in consumer-hostile decentralised systems.
Failing to take additional steps before a loss is conceptually very different from being able to take additional steps after a loss. You might as well list a whole bunch of additional things he could have done before throwing away the hard drive, e.g. having a recovery phrase split over multiple pieces of paper each stored in different bank vaults (like the Winkelvii), or simply keeping a back-up of the hard drive contents. If you lose the PIN to access your bank account, your bank would never say something like "sorry, can't help, you should have done X, Y or Z before you lost your PIN, but never mind [to quote Satoshi from the article] Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more."
It's not exactly same thing, as you obviously won't lose something like that if you already realise its value. It's more along the lines of throwing out painting from your neighbor and he becomes world best paid artist in 5 years.
Still interesting and scary to think that individual can basically "destroy" irreversibly any amount of savings by forgetting the keys/ sending it to wrong address and that can be done with 1 click.