In 2009, a Norwegian engineering student called Kristoffer Koch spent $22 on 5,000 Bitcoins while writing his master’s thesis on encryption.
Each coin cost him a fraction of a cent. He described it at the time as a bit of fun.
Then he got busy with his degree, got a job, and completely forgot about it.
Four years later, Bitcoin was suddenly all over the news.
Koch saw the coverage, remembered he had a wallet somewhere, and spent an evening trying different passwords until he got back in.
The 5,000 coins were worth $850,000.
What did Koch do with the money?
He sold about a fifth of his coins, around 1,000 Bitcoins, and bought himself a flat in Tøyen, one of Oslo’s more desirable neighbourhoods, his $22 bet had turned into property.
He kept the other 4,000.
“Not in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that they would have soared like this,” he told Norwegian broadcaster NRK in 2013.
“It’s bizarre, these psychological reflexes that make us attach a value to something that doesn’t have any in itself.”
What would the remaining coins be worth today?
Bitcoin hit an all-time high of $126,000 per coin in October 2025 before falling back sharply.
As of today (July 20) it is trading at around $65,500.
If Koch still holds those 4,000 Bitcoins – and nobody has confirmed otherwise – they are worth approximately $250 million.
His original 5,000 coins, had he never sold any of them, would be worth over $310 million.
From $22.
Kristoffer Koch. Credit: Kristoffer Koch
Is he the luckiest Bitcoin investor ever?
Possibly, but the competition for that title is thin, because almost nobody who bought Bitcoin in 2009 managed to hold on to it.
Erik Finman bought $1,000 worth of Bitcoin at 12 years old in 2011 and is now a multimillionaire.
50 Cent accidentally accumulated 700 Bitcoins in 2014 after letting fans buy his album Animal Ambition using crypto.
He forgot about the account entirely until someone told him it was worth between $7 and $8 million.
Koch’s story is different because of the scale.
$22 into a quarter of a billion dollars is not a return that belongs in the real world. It belongs in a thought experiment about time travel.
What about the people who lost everything?
For every Koch, there is a Stefan Thomas.
Thomas is a Swiss-born programmer in San Francisco who got paid 7,002 Bitcoins in 2011 for making an animated explainer video about cryptocurrency.
He stored the coins on an encrypted USB device called an IronKey and wrote the password on a piece of paper.
He lost the paper.
The IronKey gives you 10 attempts before it locks permanently.
Thomas has used eight. He has two left. The coins on the drive are currently worth more than $430 million.
“I would just lay in bed and think about it,” he told the New York Times.
“Then I would go to the computer with some new strategy, and it wouldn’t work, and I would be desperate again.”
Then there is James Howells, an IT worker from Newport in Wales who mined 8,000 Bitcoins on his laptop in 2009.
His partner accidentally threw the hard drive in the bin during a clear-out in 2013. It ended up in a landfill. Howells spent the next decade trying to get permission to dig the site up.
In 2025, a High Court judge threw the case out. The coins are still under there somewhere. At current prices, roughly $500 million worth.
How much Bitcoin is lost forever?
A lot. Crypto data firm Chainalysis estimates that about 20 per cent of all Bitcoin ever mined, somewhere around 3.7 million coins, is sitting in wallets that nobody can access.
Lost passwords, dead hard drives, people who threw things away before they knew what they were worth. At current prices, that is over $230 billion in frozen crypto.
The recovery industry has boomed as a result.
One woman who runs a business called Professional Crypto Recovery told Business Insider that demand tripled as prices climbed.
A hypnotist in South Carolina started charging one Bitcoin plus five per cent of whatever he helped people find, offering to put clients under to help them remember their passwords.
Koch didn’t need any of that. He just forgot, remembered, guessed his password, and logged in to find $850,000 sitting there waiting for him.
Most people who got into Bitcoin early either sold too soon, lost their keys, or chucked a hard drive in a skip. Koch forgot about his and got lucky.
He bought a flat. He kept the rest. And the rest turned into a quarter of a billion dollars.
All from $22 and a thesis about encryption.
