005: Crazy Crypto stories
Can you imagine accidentally throwing millions of dollars away? Did you know there is buried crypto treasure on top of Mount Everest? Michael shares some of the craziest stories from the crypto world.
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Episode Transcription – Crazy Crypto Stories
Michael 00:00
1, 2, 3, 4, 5 That is exactly how many episodes we have released of Candid Crypto. Liam and I have had a ton of fun trading this podcast. And we really can’t thank everybody that has listened to these first 5 episodes enough. Your feedback is much appreciated. And it’s just been so much fun. It’s been a lot of work, but very, very worth it because we’re so enthusiastic about crypto. And although it has its ups and downs, we can’t get enough of it.
And before we get into the episode, I do want to address the elephant in the room. You’re probably wondering, why haven’t we heard that silky smooth voice from no other Liam? And unfortunately, for those listeners that are huge, Liam fans, is not going to be on today’s podcast. He’s actually taking a well-deserved vacation on the West Coast, enjoying some of the California rays. And he will be back and he will be rolling on Episode-6. But for Episode 5, I’m actually doing a solo episode, which definitely bums me out because who am I supposed to have a candid conversation with about crypto, and efforts to distract me from how much I miss my co-host, Liam.
01:32
For today’s episode, we’re going to make it a little bit lighter. We’re going to keep it short. And we’re going to keep it fun. And I think we all need that because this week has been absolutely crazy with the crypto market. On Wednesday, May 19, 2021, the total cryptocurrency market capitalization was just over 2 trillion. At its lowest point on Wednesday afternoon, it had fallen to around 1.4 4 trillion. And according to coin market cap data, a decline of nearly 30%.
So I think a lot of us kind of needed a distraction right now because our portfolios all took a big hit. But if you’re like me, and if you like Liam, you still believe in cryptocurrency and you believe in the fundamentals of Blockchain technology. And although we had a correction, a decline, whatever you want to say, in 5, 10 years, if you stick with it, I think we’ll be very happy.
So to distract us from all this craziness that’s going on with the crypto market, I actually wanted to use that as today’s theme for Episode 5.
02:50
So today, we’re going to be talking about crazy crypto stories. I actually was searching the web, and I found a lot of really insane stories that I am just really excited to share some of my favorites that I found. And today’s episode was actually inspired by one of our OG listeners, who gave us feedback and said one of her favorite parts of listening to Episode 2 over what is Bitcoin was the story about the guy that paid 10,000 Bitcoin for a pizza. She thought that was super funny. And she said that she would be interested in listening to more stories like that. So today, we’re going to give it to you. And I want to credit Alphacash.com. I saw a cool blog article diving into a handful of crazy crypto stories. And then I just went down the rabbit hole investigating some of the details on these stories and it was just a ton of fun.
Crazy Story #1
You probably all have heard of a few cases where a million dollars in Bitcoin was lost or they throw out a hard drive and they could never find it again. And that is exactly what this story is about. In the case of James Howells, a 35-year-old IT engineer from Wales United Kingdom. He cleaned his house in 2013 and discarded by accident a hard drive with a lot more Bitcoin than he originally thought. He had two identical hard drives at the time and threw away the wrong one, aka the one that still contains the private keys for a wallet with 7500 BTC. If you do the math at one point this year, that is around $405 million. How well discovered his mistake when it was too late? And now the hard drive is somewhere around the city landfill, never to be found. Unlucky for him city authorities hadn’t let him check through the landfill. And all these years due to environmental and funding concerns this year not willing to give up. James Howells offered to donate 25% of the Bitcoins found to a COVID relief on an effort to let this man dig through the city’s trash. And it’s funny because he also apparently has support from a hedge fund to actually finance the excavation project to find the hundreds of millions of dollars a Bitcoin treasure lost in the city’s landfill. And speaking of treasure, it actually leads us to an even crazier crypto story that we’re going to end today’s episode with.
Crazy Story #2
So, this story is about treasure left on Mount Everest. In May 2018, a question and answer social media company called ask.fm was planning to launch its own “Initial Coin Offering”, also known as an ICO to fund a new platform that worked with its native token ASKT [phonetic 06:12]. So they thought it would be a great idea to send a group of professional climbers to Mount Everest and bury on the top, a ledger hardware wallet containing 500,000 ASKT. This would be around $100,000, after the ICO and above all, a really awesome crazy crypto story that I’m telling you right now.
So they actually did it, they climbed to the top of Mount Everest and took out a ledger hardware wallet with 500,000 ASKT their native token and buried it at the top of Mount Everest so they recorded the event and challenge the general public to find and pick up this treasure by any means possible.
So a crazy marketing idea, crazy idea to add to your ICO and the best part is, that’s actually not the craziest part about this story, because it’s about to get a lot more wild. So after they record this event, put it on YouTube, and challenge the world to find this treasure on top of Mount Everest, no joke, nearly everything went wrong after that point.
The first thing that went wrong, went terribly wrong, was a Sherpa guide disappeared on the way back. Not only did the Sherpa disappear on the way back, a handful of the climbers got hurt, and they had to get rescued off of Mount Everest. The very sad part about this story is that the guide was actually never found and in the end, the ICO was never launched. So the coins are still probably up on the top of Mount Everest covered in a ton of snow and forgotten, just like @ask.fm.
If you liked today’s episode, please let us know. Contact us on social media. Come to our website @CandidCryptoPodcast.com. And let us know if you want us to do more segments like this. Just keeping it like keeping it fun. So wherever you are, wherever you’re listening, I hope you’re having a good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Good night. And thank you for listening to another episode of Candid Crypto.
