Despite being stable in the past few days, the price of Bitcoin has increased by more than 30% since the US presidential election on November 5, an event that brought former President Donald Trump back to the White House.

However, there are also owners who regret being 'almost millionaires' because they lost their Bitcoin wallet themselves. In 2023, research firm Chainalysis reported that about 20% of the 18.5 million Bitcoins in circulation are stuck in locked wallets or forgotten passwords, equivalent to 124 billion USD.

Wallet of Satoshi Nakamoto

Satoshi Nakamoto - the creator of Bitcoin remains a mystery to this day. In fact, it is still unclear whether this identity belongs to a person or a group that created the most famous cryptocurrency today.

Based on a 2013 analysis, researcher Sergio Lerner believes that Satoshi Nakamoto mined about 22,000 blocks in the early days of the Bitcoin blockchain.

With each completed block, the first person to compute the correct value will be rewarded with a certain amount of Bitcoin. This number in the early days was 50 Bitcoins/block, and it decreases after every 210,000 blocks, a rule known as Bitcoin halving.

Thus, the 22,000 blocks that Satoshi originally mined would be rewarded with about 1.1 million Bitcoins, corresponding to over 103 billion USD.

Despite possessing a vast amount of money, most cryptocurrency analysts believe that Satoshi has never sold the amount of Bitcoin he owns, based on analyses like the Patoshi model. Some even argue that the creator of Bitcoin may not even remember the private key to access his wallet.

Decrypt believes that the person or group behind the name Satoshi can no longer sell Bitcoin, as doing so could expose their identity.

In a prospectus submitted to the SEC, the Coinbase exchange stated that "identifying Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym of the individual or individuals who invented Bitcoin, or circulating Bitcoin from Satoshi" could negatively affect the value of Bitcoin.

By maintaining anonymity, Nakamoto can avoid adverse legal consequences. In addition, Coinbase also lists a series of other risk factors affecting the company's business situation, such as cyberattacks, strong regulatory control, or investors' loss of confidence in cryptocurrencies.

Wallet of Mt. Gox

The Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, based in Tokyo (Japan), was established in 2010 and three years later handled nearly 70% of total cryptocurrency transactions worldwide.

This exchange was founded by Jed McCaleb, who later co-founded the Ripple and Stellar cryptocurrency projects. However, Jed sold this crypto exchange before it collapsed.

Mt. Gox was attacked multiple times in 2011 when Bitcoin reached the price of 1 USD. In early 2014, this exchange suffered significant losses when it was hacked and approximately 460 million USD worth of Bitcoin was stolen (in 2014).

To date, there is still a cryptocurrency wallet from this largest hack in history containing over 80,000 Bitcoins, and none of it has ever been spent.

With every Bitcoin from the hack being closely monitored, it will be very difficult for hackers to do anything with this money.

Wallet of Stefan Thomas

In 2011, Stefan Thomas - a German programmer living in San Francisco (USA) was gifted 7,002 BTC after posting a video explaining how the cryptocurrency market operates.

After that, he stored the money in an electronic wallet and saved the personal keys of the wallet on a hard drive (IronKey). This amount of Bitcoin, as of the morning of December 3, was worth about 670 million USD.

The problem is Thomas lost the IronKey password paper years ago. Meanwhile, the IronKey hard drive only allows Thomas to enter the password a maximum of 10 times.

Thomas has entered the wrong password 8 times. If he continues to enter wrong in the last 2 attempts, he will lose all the Bitcoin in the wallet.

After Thomas's story became famous, hundreds of people from all over reached out to give him advice. "One person asked me if I had tried entering 'password' yet. Many people suggested I meet with a psychic, a prophet. Others advised me to use nootropic (memory-enhancing drugs)," the German programmer recounted.

Vanguard-X believes that Thomas can still recover the Bitcoin in his virtual wallet by hiring experts to find vulnerabilities in the IronKeys hard drive, helping him bypass the law and access the hard drive.

However, IronKey claims that hacking their system is impossible. The hardware company also does not want to disclose its underlying technology, even if offered money or commissions from the Bitcoin in the wallet.

Wallet of James Howells

For over a decade, James Howells (39 years old), living in Newport (UK), has been trying to recover the hard drive containing the Bitcoin assets he believes are lying in the city landfill.

The hard drive is said to contain approximately 8,000 Bitcoins - worth about 4 million pounds (5 million USD) at the time it was thrown away, but now valued at over 569 million pounds (over 719 million USD) due to the continuous increase in the value of this currency recently, according to the BBC.

Howells bought Bitcoin in the early days of this cryptocurrency. His private key - a type of digital key used to access the money - is stored on the hard drive of the male engineer's computer. He removed this hard drive when upgrading his computer and stored it in a drawer.

The hard drive remained in the drawer until 2013 and was accidentally thrown away by his wife during a cleaning session.

Howells has repeatedly petitioned the Newport city council for permission to access the Docksway landfill to search for the lost hard drive. However, the council refused due to environmental concerns, even though Howells offered to donate 25% of the value of the Bitcoin (currently reduced to 10%).

In October, Howells announced he was suing the Newport city council for damages of 495,314,800 pounds (over 600 million USD).

After Donald Trump's victory in the US presidential election, the price of Bitcoin continuously increased, now nearing 95,000 USD. Howells speculates that next year, the Bitcoin on his hard drive could be worth 1 billion pounds (1.2 billion USD).

The city landfill contains over 1.4 million tons of waste, but he said he has narrowed down the location of the hard drive to an area containing about 100,000 tons.

"There is an object in Newport worth nearly 750 million USD and the city council does not want to search for it. I am still willing to avoid litigation and have a quick, reasonable conversation with the city council. They have to come and talk to me," Howells said.