Student Who Forgot He Spent $27 On Bitcoin For A Project Finds Out Years Later He’s Sitting On A Fortune -

An unexpected boost to the pension pot

It’s kind of like the classic Back to the Future question—if you could hop in a time machine, what would you do?Would you play the lottery with the winning numbers, place a bet on a legendary sports upset, invest in companies like Apple before they took off or maybe do all three?

Well, one student unknowingly did something pretty close to that when he put just $27 into Bitcoin and forgot about it, only to discover years later that it had massively paid off.

Even though some people are still on the fence about the whole cryptocurrency world, former President Donald Trump made headlines by trying to push the U.S. toward embracing crypto going as far as launching his own memecoin, although that didn’t go exactly as planned.Bitcoin has created a bunch of millionaires and billionaires by now. And while this particular student didn’t end up rolling in millions, the return on his tiny investment is still jaw-dropping.

According to a report by The Guardian, a student living in Norway was stunned to find out that the $27 he’d once spent on Bitcoin had grown into an amazing $886,000.Back in 2009, Kristoffer Koch put about 150 Norwegian kroner which was around $26.60 at the time into Bitcoin, long before most people had even heard of it.

Koch only traded in a small portion of his Bitcoin bank balanceNRK

He stumbled upon the cryptocurrency while writing a thesis about encryption that same year. After buying some Bitcoin as part of the project, he moved on and completely forgot about the whole thing—until Bitcoin started making waves in the news in April 2013.Fast forward just four years, and Koch realized that tiny investment had ballooned into $886,000. He didn’t waste time and used the money to buy an apartment in Oslo. What’s even wilder is that he had forgotten the password to his digital wallet. When he finally remembered it and logged in, he was stunned by the number staring back at him.

Speaking to NRK, Koch recalled: “It said I had 5,000 bitcoins in there. Measuring that in today’s rates it’s about NOK5m ($886,000).”Back in April 2013, Bitcoin hit a high of $266 before dropping all the way down to around $50. That huge drop came after authorities seized the Silk Road, an online black market. But Bitcoin being Bitcoin, it quickly rebounded, with prices spiking up by $30 in just one day.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is worth around $109,000 per coin. That means Koch’s $27 investment would be worth a fortune today. Interestingly, he only cashed out one-fifth of his Bitcoin holdings in 2013, so the rest might still be sitting somewhere in digital storage. And honestly, it makes sense—when you suddenly find yourself with almost $900,000, that’s a pretty solid payday.People on Reddit were blown away when they came across his story. Plenty of folks were left wishing they had made the same move back when Bitcoin was still under the radar.

One Redditor put it perfectly: “5000 BTC Holy Moly for 27 Dollar It’s now a half billion this is mindblowing.”

Someone else shared their appreciation: “Reading about this guy is what led me to buying bitcoin in 2014 so I am very grateful to him for sharing his story.”And another user summed it up by saying: “Buying an apartment in Oslo in 2013 was probably not a bad investment either. Even if BTC far outperformed it.”

Bitcoin is still around, and lots of people are still getting into it. But with prices climbing so high, stories like Koch’s are becoming a lot harder to come by these days.

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