Bitcoin not small potatoes for tech royalty

London – After the latest wild ride took the poster child of cryptocurrencies above $40 000 (about R609 000) before a stomach-churning plunge, the million dollar question won’t go away: how much is bitcoin actually worth?

The virtual currency barrelled to new highs to rise more than 400% over the past year, before promptly sliding some 20% and then settling around $36 000.

When it started life in 2009 as open-source software, bitcoin was essentially worth zero – though within a year it had reached the heady heights of eight cents.

At today’s market rates, bloated by a surge in institutional demand, the digital unit’s market capitalisation is worth about $670 billion with myriad other crypto coins, such as ethereum, lifting the sector nominally close to the trillion mark.

Although that’s small potatoes compared to the $68 trillion or so swilling around world stock markets, it is nonetheless the sort of financial territory staked out by Wall Street tech royalty such as Google, Apple or Tesla.

One tech site, AssetDash.com, notes that bitcoin is currently worth around as much as Facebook and a little more than Chinese e-retail giant Alibaba.

Deep-pocketed investors have recently become enthusiasts.

It is the latter who have mainly suffered as an estimated four million of the roughly 19 million bitcoin units currently in circulation have been lost.

“Lost” does not mean the coins have fallen down the back of the sofa or through a hole in a trouser pocket: they have been electronically zapped from the record, often because their owner has forgotten a password to coins hoarded on a USB stick.

One US developer mislaid his password after storing 7 002 bitcoins on one such flash drive, forcing him to wave goodbye, on paper, to around $280 million.

This week, Welshman James Howells desperately offered his local authority a quarter of his fortune to dig up a landfill site where he believes a hard drive he accidentally tossed away – and which has since soared in value to around $270 million – is buried.

The council refused, citing the cost and logistical restrictions.