Remember the story of the person who paid 10,000 BTC for two pizzas back in 2010? Well, even though that story went down in crypto history as one of the worst deals, it’s no longer the saddest story out there.
As part of an interview on July 25, QIWI CEO Sergey Solonin told the spectators at a Moscow lecture that the CTO of the Russian electronic wallet and payment network once mined and owned 500,000 BTC before losing them forever back in 2011. QIWI refused to publicly disclose the name of the CTO that used the company’s payment terminals.
The CEO explained that this was only possible because mining could be done on low-end equipment and because QIWI’s network back then was close to 100,000 terminals. “In three months he mined 500,000 bitcoins, which were worth $5 million. And now they’re worth billions!” he said, as quoted by Rusbase. This would have made the company’s CTO’s wallet the biggest wallet in existence.
When the CEO caught on, he fired the CTO, but not before asking how the mining process was implemented. The CTO didn’t answer, and the CEO’s various attempts to repeat the process weren’t successful due to the increase mining difficulty.
“I gathered a team and said we had to mine on the terminals; we then released a project we’d been working on for three months in order to resurrect our CTO’s work, but when it came down to it, mining was impossible, and our computers couldn’t handle it.”
“Now it seems I probably should have come to an agreement with him to buy all (the bitcoins) for $5 million because now we’re talking catastrophic sums of money,” the CEO further stated.
Crypto soon to be regulated in Russia
The story surfaces just before Russia’s introduction of formal regulations for cryptocurrency mining and trading. With these latest changes holders will be required to conform to tax regimes governing traditional income, as crypto trading and mining are still viewed as “shady” activities in Russia.
As mentioned before, the CTO went on to lose all the money. Solonin declared for The Bell that it’s his understanding that the employee went on to lose all the Bitcoins at a now-failed crypto exchange.