The story of Kristoffer Koch: The Norwegian who forgot he had Bitcoin
In 2009, Kristoffer Koch, an engineering student in Norway, was researching cryptography for his thesis when he came across something new called Bitcoin. Out of curiosity —and almost as an academic experiment— he decided to buy 5,000 bitcoins for about $27 dollars.
After making the purchase, he stored the coins in his digital wallet and… completely forgot!
Four years later, in 2013, he heard in the news that Bitcoin had risen in price and remembered his purchase. He searched for his wallet, managed to recover the password, and discovered that his 5,000 bitcoins were now worth around $900,000 dollars.
With that money, Kristoffer bought an apartment in Oslo, something unthinkable for someone so young at that time. The most curious thing is that, if he had waited a few more years, that same amount of bitcoins would have been worth over $300 million at the peak in 2021.
