The 9 Biggest Screwups in Bitcoin History

Do you know where your bitcoins are right now? Hopefully they're still in your wallet where you left them, but the history of bitcoin is littered with human error, poorly implemented software and heists that would make even the most hardened of Wild West outlaws tip their hat in respect.

Just to drive that point home, here are the nine biggest screwups in bitcoin history.

On 8th August 2010 bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik wrote what could be mildly described as the biggest understatement since Apollo 13 told Houston: "We've had a problem here."

Originally founded as a trading card site, Mt. Gox grew to become bitcoin's largest bitcoin exchange, helmed by French-born Mark Karpeles who unadvisedly wrote all of the site's code by himself without oversight or review by others.

The US government's recent auction of bitcoin seized from Silk Road was a landmark in bitcoin's story - as many have pointed out, it gives some small sense of legitimacy to the currency in the sense that the government wouldn't auction off seized cocaine, for example.

Of course this kind of mistake is common - so common that even acclaimed bitcoin developer Amir Taaki made the mistake back in 2012 when he ran Intersango, a UK-based bitcoin exchange that eventually closed down in late 2012 after its banking relationship with Metro Banks turned sour.

It's unclear what caused the faulty transaction fees, but over the course of a few days one bitcoin address added huge fees to its transactions, essentially donating ridiculous sums of bitcoin to miners.

One transaction, totalling only 0.01 bitcoin, had an extra 80 bitcoin attached as a transaction fee.

Something similar happened to this hapless Redditor, who made a simple typing error back in July 2013, attaching 30 bitcoin to a 38 bitcoin transaction.

Of course the award for all time greatest bitcoin fail has to go to James Howells from Wales, who sent £4.2 million to the landfill when he chucked out a hard drive containing the private keys for 7,500 bitcoin.