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With more and more online gambling sites popping up that incorporate the anonymous digital currency bitcoin, CoinDesk.com featured an interesting piece Monday that unveils nine of the biggest screw-ups in bitcoin’s short – and some would say shaky – history.
As you can see, these aren’t just simple screw-ups.
There was that time Someone hacked 92 billion BTC into existence.
How serious was this?
Bitcoin’s lead developer Wladimir Van Der Laan is pretty blunt about it, telling CoinDesk’s Kadhim Shubber: “It was the worst problem ever.”
More recently we had the collapse of the biggest bitcoin exchange Mt.Gox.
French-born Mark Karpeles founded Mt.Gox and there are some who believe he ran off with all the cash after the exchange was supposedly hacked.
The worst screw-up in bitcoin history according to Shubber:
Of course the award for all time greatest bitcoin fail has to go to James Howells from Wales, who sent £4.2 million to the landfill when he chucked out a hard drive containing the private keys for 7,500 bitcoin.
Coming just a month after the news that Norwegian PhD student Kristoffer Koch had bought himself a house after discovering an old hard drive with 5,000 bitcoin on it (which he paid only $27 for in 2009), James Howells’ landfill story felt especially painful.
Other problems: Bitcoin Core version 0.8 was released in March 2013 but was not compatible with previous versions and the sudden closure of Iceland's auroracoin.
- Aaron Goldstein, Gambling911.com
