💥The guy who threw away 10,000
$BTC .
And he knows it. And he lives with that.
In 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz paid for two pizzas with 10,000 Bitcoin.
Everyone knows him. That's already the tourist anecdote.
But there's a story that almost nobody tells.
James Howells, a British engineer, mined 8,000 BTC in 2009.
He stored it on a hard drive.
In 2013, while cleaning his office, he accidentally threw it away.
The drive ended up in a landfill in Newport, Wales.
Today that drive is worth over 700 million dollars.
It's buried under tons of trash.
And the local government has denied him the permit to dig for years.
Howells has offered the municipality 25% of the find.
They've said no. Three times.
But here comes what almost nobody knows:
Before any exchange existed,
before Coinbase, before Binance,
the only place you could 'buy' Bitcoin was a forum called Bitcointalk.
On that forum, in 2010, a user sold 10,000 BTC for $41 dollars. $USDT
It wasn't Laszlo.
It was a silent transaction, unnamed, with no public history.
The buyer never posted again.
Nobody knows who it was.
Nobody knows if they still hold those coins.
In its early years, Crypto wasn't Wall Street.
It was a forum of cypherpunks, idealists, and the curious
who believed money could exist without banks.
Some became millionaires without knowing it.
Others lost fortunes for not securely storing 12 words.
The technology didn't fail.
The human context failed, as it wasn't ready to understand it yet.
And you? When did you enter this world?
Did you arrive late or just in time for the next chapter?
Fran Berlín | Blockchain Institute.
#bitcoin #CryptoHistory #FranBerlin #Web3 #InstitutoBlockchain