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Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins — The Bitcoin Investor Who Lost $800 Million in the Municipal Tip
A cautionary tale of self-custody gone wrong
One of the perilous sides of investing in Bitcoin, is that holders have to think about how and where they’ll store their stash. It’s easier to store digital gold than it is the physical variety, but holders of Bitcoin are faced with a dilemma over where to keep the hardware wallet that contains the private cryptographic keys that correspond to their coins such that it isn’t lost, damaged or stolen.
Most would feel a little shifty with just a few hundred dollars in cash about their person, and wouldn’t feel comfortable storing thousands of dollars around the house. Yet, that’s effectively the situation that Bitcoiners face once they’ve amassed a holding of BTC — how to safely and securely store it so that it’s protected from fire, theft or loss.
Hardware wallets protect the keys behind layers of security such as pass phrases and pin numbers, but what do you then do with the hardware wallet itself?
The story of one early Bitcoiner offers a warning about how badly things can go wrong.
