Man buys $27 of bitcoin, forgets about them, finds they're now worth $886k

Bought in 2009, currency’s rise in value saw small investment turn into enough to buy an apartment in a wealthy area of Oslo

Bitcoin: what you need to know
This article was originally published on 29 October 2013. Due to a technical fault, it has been republished here, on a new page.
Norwegian man discovers $27 bitcoin investment now worth more than enough to buy a flat
Norwegian man discovers $27 bitcoin investment now worth more than enough to buy an apartment. Photograph: George Frey/Getty Images
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Samuel Gibbs
Wednesday 9 December 2015 01.24 GMT Last modified on Friday 14 July 2017 21.22 BST
The meteoric rise in bitcoin has meant that within the space of four years, one Norwegian man’s $27 investment turned into a forgotten $886,000 windfall.

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Kristoffer Koch invested 150 kroner ($26.60) in 5,000 bitcoins in 2009, after discovering them during the course of writing a thesis on encryption. He promptly forgot about them until widespread media coverage of the anonymous, decentralised, peer-to-peer digital currency in April 2013 jogged his memory.

Bitcoins are stored in encrypted wallets secured with a private key, something Koch had forgotten. After eventually working out what the password could be, Koch got a pleasant surprise:

“It said I had 5,000 bitcoins in there. Measuring that in today’s rates it’s about NOK5m ($886,000),” Koch told NRK.