The Cleaning Spree that Cost 6 Million Dollars

Do you remember being thirtyten years old, playing video games in your room, when your parents would come in and demand it be clean before you could continue dominating Runescape? 

At the time, it seemed impossible to come up with a good reason why you shouldn’t have to clean your room.

My best work was claiming it was an ‘injury risk’ and would interfere with my ‘budding basketball career’ (I’m 5’7).

But after the misfortune that landed at the doorstep of a young British couple, I’ve stumbled across the greatest argument against cleaning you could find:

It might cost you six million dollars.

‘Little Black USB Stick’ Home to Bitcoin Fortune

According to British woman Ellie Hart, spring cleaning can have some devastating consequences.

During a routine tidy of her partner’s desk drawer, she came upon severed cables, discarded receipts and dearly departed batteries.

Sounds like a junk drawer, right? Hey, no judgement, I’ve got one too.

Logically, none of these items have any particular use clogging up drawer space that could instead be used to house important objects, such as an… I don’t know… a Bitcoin wallet.

Moving through the piles of seemingly useless detritus, Ellie Hart ruthlessly discarded the drawer’s contents and thought nothing more of it.

Until her partner asked a question that sent an unimaginable wave of panic coursing through her veins:

‘Have you seen a little black USB stick [I] use for Bitcoin?’

Because she immediately knew the answer. Yes. It was part of the recently tossed bits and bobs from the junk drawer.

Speaking to the UK press, Hart relived the moment she realised she had thrown away a potential fortune.

‘My heart just sank…I felt absolutely sick…it was the worst mistake I’ve ever made…It’s hard to move past something like this. You replay it constantly, the moment you picked it up, the second it landed in the bin. I’d do anything to undo it.’

It’s a pretty gut-wrenching tale. Even if you are clueless about the crypto market, you have at least some idea that Bitcoin is pretty valuable.

To make matters worse, her partner had been investing in Bitcoin since 2013 – so he was pretty clued-in to the whole scene. And after 12 years of growth, his portfolio was brimming at the seams.

$3.8 million USD ($6.03 million AUD) was the wallet’s worth on the day it was lost.

Who knew an innocuous black USB dongle could be so valuable?  

Reddit Quickly on the Case of Deciding Who to Blame

A question immediately springs to mind: who on Earth keeps their private Bitcoin keys on a random USB stick?

Although reports nor interviews have confirmed this, it does seem quite possible the ‘USB’ that was given a ride in the rubbish tip was actually a Ledger – renowned as a top-tier storage solution for digital assets.

Looking at the Ledger Nano model, it’s easy to see how, to a non-investor, it could be mistaken for an old USB drive with nothing but a malicious .exe and photos from an overseas trip with an ex. 

Upon the news breaking, the associated Reddit thread was quickly abuzz with comments passing blame.

Some were fast to point the finger at the man who owned the BTC.

Others, however, adopted the stance of ‘it takes two to tango’.

And of course, it wouldn’t be the internet without an appropriately insensitive conspiracy theory.

In reality, dishing out the blame for such an incident ignores the fact that both will suffer – and while it’s nice to be glib online, it is hard not to feel a little bad for Ellie Hart and her partner.

What Can We Learn From the Misfortune of Others

So… what’s the lesson here?

Custody of digital assets can be a bit of a scary barrier to entry. 

You do (almost) everything right, use a top-shelf hardware wallet like a Ledger (I’m speculating here, but still) and all it takes is a tiny, good-intentioned mistake and your fortunes go missing.

Alternatively, you can put your trust in third-party custody. With regulations coming in, this may not be as challenging a solution as it once was, and Governments may look to shore up mismanaged funds. Even so, the events of 2022 and FTX’s collapse have no doubt scarred many.

In reality, the answer is actually fairly simple.

A crypto hardware wallet doesn’t actually store your digital currencies on the device. Rather, it contains a set of keys that, when punched into a blockchain, shows ownership of digital assets and can be used to make transactions.

You can theoretically buy and lose one thousand hardware wallets holding billions of worth of cryptocurrency and never lose a cent.

Why? Seed phrases – a string of random words that basically act as a ‘master key’ for your wallet.

So, as long as Ellie Hart and her partner kept a secure backup of the wallet’s seed phrase, they’ll have no problem recovering the six million dollars of Bitcoin.

They do have a backup of the seed phrase, right?

Right?