Romanian bitcoin blogger and billionaire Mircea Popescu, 41, believed to be one of the largest owners of the cryptocurrency, has reportedly died in a drowning incident off the Costa Rican coast.
While mystery shrouds Popescu’s death, it has made many curious as to what would happen to the $1 billion he had amassed in Bitcoin. There are chances it will be lost forever unless he had entrusted someone with access to his digital wallets.
Crypto analyst Alexander Mardar tweeted that Popescu’s death could mean that “a significant amount of $BTC (Bitcoin) might be lost forever”.
In 2019, for instance, after Gerald Cotton, the founder of Canada’s largest crypto exchange, died suddenly, his wife had told investors that the keys to $135 million in cryptocurrency were only with Cotten.
In another incident, United Kingdom’s James Howells, who had mined 7,500 Bitcoins and stored them on the hard drive of his laptop, accidentally threw away the hard drive while cleaning his house in 2013. In today’s time, his Bitcoin assets would be valued at $255 million, approximately.
Like Howells, Popescu too was an early adopter of cryptocurrency. He lived a life embroiled in controversies and had been dubbed the father of “Bitcoin Toxicity” by crypto news site Bitcoin.com. He was also accused of racism and sexism frequently. However, there were some who regarded him as a visionary and called him a “Bitcoin Evangelist”.
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