A Reddit user says he (or she) recently regained access to the keys of 127 bitcoins eight years after last accessing the coins. Immediately after regaining access, the user sold all the bitcoins and pocketed over $4 million in the process. According to the user, they received the bitcoins as payment for participating in surveys and some random online tasks.
Bitcoin Keys in Old Computer
The user initally intended to purchase a valuable in-game currency called Uridium using the bitcoins as payment. Writing about their experience, the user who goes by the name Bitcoinholderthanku, explains how a visit to his grandparents’ home reunited him (or her) with the 127 bitcoins. In the post, the Reddit user begins his account saying:
I used to play Dark Orbit at my grandpa’s house, and I was there for around a week during the holidays. While I was there I was through his old Dell computer that I used to play the game and came across a .txt folder that was labelled ‘keys.’
Although the user claims they do not remember why they ultimately failed to buy the gaming currency, they are nonetheless grateful for the way things have turned out. After holding the coins for eight years, the Reddit user sold these on January 3 for a price of just under $34,000 each.
Liquidating the 127 BTC
Meanwhile, the Reddit user’s initial post generated interest with some users expressing doubts about the story. Others questioned how the user managed to liquidate all the 127 BTC when “even the largest exchanges have limits well under $100K/day of how much BTC you can trade on their platform.”
In the follow-up post, the user explains that after weighing the various liquidating options, they settled for selling “the assets through an OTC Principal Desk.” Next, the user explains this process unfolded:
I went back and forth between different companies and ultimately ended up selling all 127 bitcoins for a price of $33,439.02 per coin minus a 0.15% fee. The net was roughly $4.24 million.
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Meanwhile, to prove that the story is real as demanded by some Redditors, the user has shared a screenshot that appears to show their checking account with a balance of $4.2 million on January 7. The user, however, says they “had to scribble out the title of the transaction” because they did want to reveal the identity of the company they dealt with.
The user ends by saying that after “hodl(ing) for 8-9 years which is more than the vast majority of crypto users”, he thinks he would “not have sold all the 127 bitcoins if given a second chance.”
Between the period of receiving the $4.2 million payment and the second Reddit post, the price of bitcoin went up by more than $7,000 to $41,000. Still, at the time of writing, the crypto had dropped and was trading at just above $35,000.
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