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A landfill in Wales holding $578 million in bitcoin, a Ukrainian politician who encrypted his own private keys thinking the file was a movie — the real, documented crypto mistakes and what each one actually cost
Pierre Borthiry - Peiobty / Unsplash
The dollar figures below aren't fixed losses in the traditional sense, since in most cases the actual bitcoin still exists somewhere, permanently inaccessible rather than spent or stolen, meaning the value attached to each mistake keeps climbing or falling alongside Bitcoin's own price and isn't the same number it would have been the day the mistake actually happened.
The cases below are ranked by their most recently reported dollar value, largest to smallest, and range from a single forgotten password to a single mistimed trade executed in seconds.
