Think you’re having a rough Monday morning? Probably not as bad as the guy in this next story and his mistake of epic proportions.
Up on the bitcoin page at Reddit.com is a story that’s no short of eye-catching. It starts with said user trying to send a bitcoin address funds. Except — oh dear — it’s the wrong address.
It’s happened before, and it will continue to happen in the future, likely.
But the amount sent is what’s really eye-popping. In the words of the original poster: “If you just received 800 Bitcoin out of the blue, it was from me”.
You read that right. Eight hundred bitcoins. If you were wondering, that’s worth a whopping $504,000 at the current exchange rate. That brought the total received by the address (viewable here) 1,100 BTC or $693,000.
The previous 300 BTC transmission was sent by the same person, presumably intentionally.
(Side note: the user did confirm the validity of this story by signing a message, which you can view the contents of here.)
Wondering who the address belongs to? According to the poster, it’s Mt. Gox. And given the company lost access to hundreds of thousands of bitcoins earlier this year, it’s unlikely he’ll ever get them back (we’re hopeful for him, though!).
It outlines that one of the key benefits of bitcoin — the fact that bitcoin transactions are irreversible — can also be a downfall, particularly in these sorts of cases.
It’s an all-around unfortunate situation. Moral of the story: always verify the address you’re sending to!
[textmarker color=”C24000″]Source[/textmarker] Reddit [textmarker color=”C24000″]Image[/textmarker] Alex E. Proimos
John 
FreeJack 
Professor Digressor 
st4rbux 
ultimate facepalm.
This is why the top priority in Bitcoin development (and any crypto), by the core developers, needs to be human interface design. We need more than just engineers working on this. Bitcoin, Litecoin nor any other crypto is TRULY going to achieve mass acceptance until users are no longer confronted with long strings of confusing random letters & numbers. It has to be MUCH more intuitive than that. Every user lives in fear of getting one letter/number wrong in their send address and having their coin end up somewhere they didn’t intend them to.
On a total side note.. this is also why Namecoin won’t work. I registered all of my (.bit) domains on the namecoin blockchain a few months ago and the private keys were unintentionally deleted before I had a chance to make backups. So now, until the end of time, nobody can ever manage any of those 13 domains I created records for. Things like DNS cannot afford to be so permanently and irreparably destroyed as a result of a simple accident or mistake. Forever is too permanent for some things. Like DNS for instance. Sorry to digress.
Those registrations will expire in 36,000 blocks (a couple of years), and you can re-register.
Also: backups!
Awesome I did not know that, thank you. I am normally mr backup, this just wasn’t one of those times. So if I find the block with one of my domains in it.. I can just add 36,000 and wait for that block.. hey at least it’s something! thanks