In 2013, "Wired" magazine destroyed the private key of the Bitcoin wallet, and the 13 BTC held in it are now worth $760,000

There has been no shortage of people and institutions that have seriously underestimated the potential of cryptocurrencies.

One of the people who has been negative about Bitcoin is Wired magazine, which in 2013 destroyed the private keys of a Bitcoin wallet holding 13.34623579 BTC in order to prove that the cryptocurrency is only It's just an "abstract concept". The bitcoins in the inaccessible address are now worth $761,000.

Wired writer Robert McMillan (now a Wall Street Journal reporter) set up a Butterfy Labs bitcoin mining rig in the corner of his office to find out what the hell was going on. At the end of his little experiment, he wasn't surprised at all.

Full points for arriving early, zero for choosing wisely.

"The world's most popular digital currency is really nothing more than an abstraction," he wrote. At the time, the reporter mulled what to do with the bitcoins, initially considering donating them to charity.

"But in the end, the answer is obvious," he wrote, "We are destroying the private keys used by our bitcoin wallets."

“This keeps our ever-growing Bitcoin profits locked away in a digital vault forever — or at least until someone cracks the SHA-256 encryption that secures it.”

At the time, Butterfly Labs ASICs produced an average of two bitcoins every ten days. In the Wired article, it noted that two bitcoins were worth about $220 at the time. They are now worth about $57,000 each, up about 510,000%.

In 2013, it took an average of 13 hours for an ordinary PC to mine a BTC. By 2014, this time had increased to 23 days. According to the New York Times, it will take 10 years to mine a single BTC by 2021.

However, as early as 2013, Bitcoin mining difficulty has increased exponentially. McMillan complained that since 2009, the difficulty of winning the bitcoin mining "lottery" has increased by about 10 million times.

Reddit user leMartinx highlighted the article in a thread yesterday, writing that the debacle shows "a long way we've come since 2013." But many other users were less forgiving, Take Cappy2020, for example, who commented: “They deserve their arrogance,” adding: “Even if you think Bitcoin is just a ‘pipe dream,’ at least grab it, or you might be wrong.”

Meanwhile, BakedPotato840 wrote:

“It’s not surprising that past posts have said this about Bitcoin. The ones who really deserve criticism are those who still hold those views to this day.”

Cointelegraph Chinese is a blockchain news information platform, and the information provided only represents the author's personal opinion, has nothing to do with the position of the Cointelegraph Chinese platform, and does not constitute any investment and financial advice. Readers are requested to establish correct currency concepts and investment concepts, and earnestly raise risk awareness.