Poor Irish lad loses €53.6M of bitcoin.

To be fair, before you feel too sorry for the lad it was all accumulated through selling drugs for crypto on the silk road so it's not that surprising that revenue sized all of his assets. It was 53.6 million spread across 12 wallets. The funny part being that while he was arrested for dealing in 2017 and sentenced to 5 years in prison, his old house where his passwords were hidden was broken into and a lot of pieces dumped by the landlord after that.

The Dubliner is a former security guard who briefly became a beekeeper and won awards for his honey before he turned his attention to growing cannabis for more than a decade. Collins had much smaller amounts of bitcoin in other accounts, valued at €1.5 million, that the Cab has been able to access. Those bitcoin and more than €100,000 in cash has been seized from him. ref: Irish times

He accumulated a lot of it in 2011-2012 as it steeply rose in value since then.

In early 2017 he had just over 6,000 bitcoin in one account but he feared it may be too easy for a hacker to access. He decided to spread his wealth across 12 new accounts and transferred exactly 500 bitcoin, worth almost €4.5 million, into each of them. Collins then printed out the codes for the 12 accounts onto an A4 piece of paper. He hid the paper inside the aluminium cap of his case containing his rod which he kept at his rented home in Farnaught, Cornamona, Co Galway. But when he was arrested with cannabis herb in 2017 in Co Wicklow and jailed for five years, there was a break-in at the house and it was also cleared on behalf of the landlord with many of Collins’s items being taken to a dump in Co Galway. ref: Irish times

Now I'm not entirely sure that I believe him in having only one set of codes to access the wallets for that amount of money. I know that I would have set up at least two more fail safes in case something happened to the ones in my house but it doesn't really matter for now. As it stands revenue have the wallets seized but can't access them to get at the bitcoin. Usually they would go through the courts until a conviction was reached and then get a court order to sell the assets at auction and recover the value of the bitcoin. It has happened here in smaller amounts for revenue to auction off ethereum and bitcoin but never to this scale.

He didn't actually live too far away from myself so i might have to take a trip to that dump. For 53 million it might be worth taking a look around in the shit.

Any lad who was smart enough to run this operation for so long is hardly stupid enough to lose his keys so easily if they were ever in that rod to begin with. It will be interesting to see what happens from here and if the wallets still go up for auction at a reduced price.