BITCOIN RUSH

Solving crime pays

At one stage, the FBI owned the biggest Bitcoin wallet, after seizing 144,000 Bitcoins while shutting down the Silk Road online black market in 2013. It later auctioned them off, collecting $48 million.

A pizza in a million

In 2010 Laszlo Hanyecz purchased two Papa John’s pizzas from another Bitcoin enthusiast in the first ‘real-world’ Bitcoin transaction for 10,000 units, which at the time were worth roughly £30. Today, they would be worth about £84 million.

Gig economy

Back in 2009, singer Lily Allen was offered ‘hundreds of thousands’ of Bitcoins to play a live-stream broadcast in the virtual world Second Life but she refused. Allen revealed the offer in a tweet in 2014, saying that she’d replied, ‘as if’. She ended the tweet with, ‘#idiot #idiot’. Now, 200,000 Bitcoins would be worth £1.69 billion, making her four times richer than Madonna, who’s worth about £418 million.

Expensive mistake

James Howells accidentally threw away a computer hard drive containing 7,500 Bitcoins in 2013. At the time they were worth about $975,000 (£700,000), but now the Bitcoins, sitting at the bottom of a landfill site in Newport, Wales, are worth £63.5 million. He has since made several requests to the local council to sift through the landfill. It is estimated that around 2.78 million Bitcoin have been lost since the currency’s creation in 2009.

Kidnapped

Pavel Lerner, an executive of the Uk-registered cryptocurrency exchange Exmo Finance was kidnapped whilst leaving the company’s offices in Kiev, Ukraine, and apparently was only released after paying $1 million in Bitcoin to his abductors.

Meme words

Seasoned cryptocurrency users will be familiar with the term HODL, coined during the great Bitcoin crash of 2013 by a user named Gamekyuubi on chatroom Bitcointalk.org, who ranted about why he wasn’t going to exchange his Bitcoins but hold on to them, misspelling hold in his fury as ‘hodl’.

It’s a Doge life

Cryptocurrency Dogecoin was created as a parody, starring the ‘Doge’ internet meme of a Shiba Inu dog, but it acquired a loyal following, driving up its value. It has reached a market-capitalisation high of £1.5 million and has sponsored NASCAR racer Josh Wise.