Featured Image Credit: Chesnot/KristofferKoch
Topics: Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Money
Joe Yates
A student who forgot he invested $27 in Bitcoin for school project returned to a shocking fortune years later.
Things like this occur only in our wildest dreams, although if you're Kristoffer Koch I'm sure it would certainly feel pretty vivid.
He was just 25 years old when he decided to take a gamble and invest in the digital world - something that, back then, would have been a risk.
His curious purchase occurred back in 2009, and although he wasn’t so sure about the digital currency, he decided to have a punt after reading an old document written by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 - the presumed pseudonymous person or persons who developed Bitcoin.
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Koch had a fascination with pioneering technology, so decided to take the chance and procured 5,000 Bitcoin tokens.
Divergent accounts suggest his initial investment ranges somewhere from $22 and up to $27.
But as years passed, Koch simply forgot about his investment, explaining that there wasn't really anything worth purchasing.
Binance Feed reports that he had never really intended to actually use those funds in cryptocurrency as he stated: “The sole purchasable items in those days were alpaca socks, thus I proceeded with my life and relinquished thoughts of this venture to instead concentrate on securing gainful employment.”
But four years later, Koch came across reports that the valuation was surging and decided to log in to his account.
He was greeted with an eye-watering sum of around $850,000 - not bad for a $27 alpaca socks kitty.
That same investment would see him return around 22 million times his original investment, at a current value of about $594.5 million.
Speaking about his score, Koch told local media: "Not in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that they would have soared like this.
"It's bizarre, these psychological reflexes that make us attach a value to something that doesn't have any in itself."
Obviously, Bitcoins are typically stored in encrypted wallets. And rather relate-ably, he admitted it took him a while to actually remember the password to be able to unlock the safe and access them.
In 2013, when he got his fortune, Koch cashed in a fifth of his reserves and after paying taxes and was able to buy himself a fancy flat in Oslo.
That means, if he left four-fifths of the fortune in his account he'd be worth a staggering $475 million - not a bad investment.