EPISODE · Jan 7, 2022 · 51 MIN
Which Treasure Will We See First? The Half Billion Dollar Bitcoin Password Buried in the Garbage? JP Morgan's 1.5lbs Gold Pocket Watch? Gold & Silver Coins from the Legendary San Jose Shipwreck?
from The Best Paragraph I've Read... · host Zac & Don
The Best Paragraph I've Read: Bitcoin is also easy to lose. Conventional money comes full of safeguards: paper currency is distinctively colored and has a unique feel; centuries of design have gone into folding wallets and zippered purses. And once your money is deposited in a bank you have a record of what you own. If you lose your statement, the bank will send you another. Forget your online password and you can reset it. The sixty-four-character private key for your bitcoin looks like any other computer rune and is nearly impossible to memorize. It can also be difficult to remember where you have stored the key. On Reddit, one user, writing in 2019, complained that he had lost ten thousand bitcoins because his mother had thrown out his old laptop. Another early crypto user was irritated by a clicking sound on his hard drive and unthinkingly tossed it out. It contained a file with access to fourteen hundred bitcoins, which he had bought for twenty-five dollars. From the start, users debated whether it was a feature or a bug of the system that bitcoin was so easy to lose. In a 2010 post to an online forum, a newbie named virtualcoin complained that bitcoin seemed risky. “If somebody’s losing his wallet (e.g. due to disk crash) he’s not able to get back his coins, is he?” the poster wrote. “They’re lost forever?” A more experienced owner named Laszlo Hanyecz, a Web developer in Florida, asked what the big deal was—people lose their wallets in the ocean, and “it’s really not that significant.” Nakamoto weighed in a few hours later, and he was unapologetic: “Lost coins only make everyone else’s coins worth slightly more.” This paragraph comes from the New Yorker in an article titled: "Half A Billion In Bitcoin, Lost In The Dump." The article is written by D. T. Max. You can read the article here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/13/half-a-billion-in-bitcoin-lost-in-the-dump Zac and Don discuss the question of "Which treasure will we see first?" Will it be the bitcoin password buried in a garbage dump? JP Morgan's Pocket watch? Gold from the San Jose Shipwreck? Zac and Don also discuss these articles and video clip: JP Morgan Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zi1hp3vKkMo San Jose Shipwreck https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20190908-a-shipwreck-worth-billions-off-the-coast-of-cartagena https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/545416/take-closer-look-cargo-billion-dollar-san-jose-shipwreck
Embed this episode
Ready to play
Which Treasure Will We See First? The Half Billion Dollar Bitcoin Password Buried in the Garbage? JP Morgan's 1.5lbs Gold Pocket Watch? Gold & Silver Coins from the Legendary San Jose Shipwreck?
No transcript for this episode yet
Similar Episodes
No similar episodes found.
Similar Podcasts
No similar podcasts found.