13 years ago, a Bitcoin forum user lost 9000 BTC (worth around $630 at the time) due to a simple technical error, an amount that is now worth over $240 million.

Yes, another 'hindsight is 20/20' post, and sure this person might have sold all of this amount of Bitcoin for like 5-10x gain and pocketed ''just thousands'' , but it also serves as a proof of how much Bitcoin has been lost forever just by these very early whales (current estimations are that around 2 to 6 million BTC has been lost permanently which does make all of our owned circulating BTC more scarce and valuable).

This particular person with nickname 'Stone Man' wasn't even an early miner, he was actually buying those Bitcoins off of exchanges and transferring them to his wallet. Value of 1 BTC on the month he made this post was going between 6 and 7 cents, but the day he posted the thread, it was worth a whooping 7 cents. Here is screenshot of his post where he explains exactly how he lost basically all of his Bitcoin:

His forum post

And here is the wallet where he sent those 8999 Bitcoins that are permanently lost forever https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/addresses/btc/167ZWTT8n6s4ya8cGjqNNQjDwDGY31vmHg . Looks like people have been sending some satoshis in meantime to that address to pay their respects (F).

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This was an era where you relied on your 'wallet.dat' file on your HDD/flash drive etc.., there were no seed phrases that you could remember and recover the wallet, so it's safe to say these Bitcoins will be forever inaccessible.