Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: The Bitcoin Lost-and-Found

Finders keepers

In the early days of Bitcoin, it was (1) not worth very much and (2) used mostly to buy drugs online. So a lot of people had the experience of, like, acquiring 500 Bitcoins to buy some molly, getting 100 Bitcoins back in change, taking the drugs and forgetting about the whole transaction for a decade. And then reading a news story about Bitcoin and thinking “oh damn that’s like $7 million, I wonder where my Bitcoins are,” and not being able to find them. Somewhere there’s a Bitcoin wallet that they “own,” but they have long since forgotten the ...