From $500 to $10M Overnight: BitcoinTalk User Strikes Gold with 2012 Bitcoin Cache

A dormant Bitcoin fortune wakes up—and makes its holder a multimillionaire overnight.

Buried since 2012, a forgotten stash of BTC just turned an early adopter into crypto royalty. The anonymous BitcoinTalk forum user reportedly turned a $500 investment into a staggering $10M windfall after accessing a long-lost wallet.

How it happened: No fancy trading strategies—just old-school HODLing while Wall Street 'experts' dismissed Bitcoin as a fad. The coins sat untouched through three halvings, two bear markets, and one Elon Musk tweetstorm.

The kicker: This isn’t some VC-funded moonboy. Just an ordinary person who believed in crypto before your financial advisor could spell 'blockchain.'

As traditional finance scrambles to explain how $500 beats hedge fund returns, one thing’s clear: in crypto, patience pays better than privilege.

A BitcoinTalk user just turned a $500 Casascius Bitcoin bar from 2012 into a $10 million fortune. After holding the 100 BTC bar for over a decade, he finally cracked it open, only to lose $40K in Bitcoin Cash within minutes due to a leaked private key.

Here’s what happened behind this rare piece of Bitcoin history.

100 BTC Bar Becomes a Jackpot

Back in 2012, when bitcoin was still a niche idea traded mostly among tech enthusiasts, JohnGalt got his hands on a Casascius gold bar loaded with 100 BTC. At the time, Bitcoin’s price hovered around $5, so he paid about $500 for it worth almost nothing to most people back then.

But for JohnGalt, it felt special to hold Bitcoin in physical form.

Over the years, he admitted he was tempted many times to sell it. He even tried to auction it a few times but found it hard to part with something so unique. The problem? Not many people trusted buying a physical Bitcoin bar for millions when you could just buy Bitcoin directly.

$10 Million BTC Bar

Fast forward to now, Bitcoin has smashed through $118,000, turning JohnGalt’s 100 BTC into about $10 million. He explained that holding something worth eight figures felt too risky, so he finally decided to crack open the bar and claim his coins.

So, he made the tough call: break open the bar, reveal the private key, and MOVE those 100 BTC into his wallet.

That simple action turned a collector’s item back into pure Bitcoin, instantly worth about $10 million.

Exposed Private Key Costs Him $40K

But there was a twist. Because Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash share the same private key system, someone with sharp eyes spotted JohnGalt’s partially exposed private key in a photo he posted online. 

Within nine minutes, they used it to drain about $40,000 worth of Bitcoin Cash before JohnGalt could claim it himself.