Bitcoin Heartbreak: South African Man Loses Password to $1 Million Worth of BTC

• A young South African man has lost access to 20 Bitcoins after deleting the file containing his crypto wallet password from his computer

• The owner of the lost coins revealed that he started mining Bitcoin 10 years ago using AMD Phenom X3 processor computer

• Despite several attempts to recover the coins which are worth more than $900,000 in today’s market, he has been unsuccessful

A young South African electronics engineer, pseudonym Mark Michaels is currently ruing a decision that he made 10 years ago.

Michaels deleted a text document that contained the keys and password to 20 bitcoins from his computer.

The 24-year-old disclosed that he started mining the cryptocurrency 10 years ago, using a modified computer with “AMD Phenom X3 processor and 512MB RAM”.

Michaels was only in seventh grade at that time and picked interest in cryptocurrencies after reading about them online.

The engineer revealed that when he started mining, Bitcoin was trading at $0.08, far below its current value.

Michaels eventually lost interest in the flagship cryptocurrency due to the low prices of coins and lack of exchanges to sell them to.

He finally gave up and deleted the file because he believed the coins were worthless and mining didn’t allow him to run other things on his computer.

“Eventually, I got bored of it, as you couldn’t do much else on your PC while it was busy, and the bitcoin you mined was practically worthless.”

Fast forward 7 years when the price of Bitcoin was now up to $1000, Mark began making efforts to recover the lost coins but they proved to be unsuccessful.

Going by today’s exchange rate, the lost coins are worth more than $900,000.