In 2009, a Norwegian student named Kristoffer Koch was writing a thesis on encryption and came across a strange new thing called Bitcoin. In the spirit of thorough research, he bought some: 5,000 coins, for 150 kroner — about twenty-seven US dollars. Then he did what most people do with thesis research. He forgot it completely.
Four years passed. Koch graduated, got a job, got engaged. Bitcoin, meanwhile, did what Bitcoin does, and by April 2013 it was in the news enough that something stirred in his memory. He went looking for the wallet. Then he went looking for the password. It took a day of digging to remember it — and when the wallet opened, the twenty-seven dollars had become roughly US$886,000.
He sold about a fifth of it — around 1,000 BTC — and bought an apartment in Tøyen, one of the nicer corners of Oslo. The remainder stayed his business; what he holds today has never been public, so the figure at the top of this page prices the original five thousand, as a matter of record rather than a statement of his net worth. It updates hourly. His flat does not need to.
The Archive keeps this file for one reason: it is the control group. Consider the mechanism. A man pays almost nothing, pays no attention, makes no decisions, forgets his own password — and wins. Two files over, the same negligence put a hard drive under a Welsh landfill. The inputs were identical. The outcomes were not.
The Bureau's finding: RECOVERED, with honours. The difference between Case 002 and Case 005 was never diligence, intelligence, or character. It was which object survived being forgotten. The Bureau finds that the universe does not grade on effort, and notes that this is the single most upsetting fact on file.