This month that bitcoin has risen abruptly compared to the previous months, a lot of people have created new topics asking for help about their funds. For example
this gentleman appeared out of nowhere after 9 years that had bought bitcoins and created a new thread, explaining that
he found a paper wallet that was damaged in his closet. And now I'm asking myself, why now? Let's assume that he had bought 100 bitcoins in 2012. By 2016, he would have a great fortune. By the end of 2017 an even bigger.
Don't they read the news? Because if I had bought that amount of coins a decade ago, I'm sure that I'd see out of curiosity how well it has gone. Since the paper wallet was in his closet, it means that he didn't care that much.
It was very clear that the author of that thread forgot about those BTC, so no matter what the news is, if you forgot that you bought some you wouldn't do a thing. This also reminds me of the BTC I left on an exchange. I forgot that I used that exchange and lucky, before the exchange shutdown they send an email to their user asking them to withdraw their fund. That is when I knew that I left some BTC on that exchange, it had been 3 years that passed before I received that email and realized that I have some BTC to withdraw from their site. I think it's not that he doesn't care, it is that during those time BTC was too cheap that forgetting it is not a big deal.
Actually, yes, there are a lot of people that never thought that btc price will be this big. So those early users that had good amount of btc, they ignored their coins for long time. And when the price goes up, they started to uncover those lost keys/pw to open their wallets. And in my case, as we all know, a lot of us are using different exchanges to trade coins, I keep all the login details in one place and check every once in a while. Some exchanges actually closed down already, remember nova/tradesat/cryptopia and many others. I bet a lot of them had their coins that were not recovered because of the shutdown.