I was just reading some old posts on Bitcoin Forum and I found this post from July 06, 2011. It's crazy how people were thinking about Bitcoin back then. This dude could've made a ton of Bitcoins, but he chose to delete the wallets and "destroy" them. This is the dumbest Bitcoin story I've heard. Can't believe that.
Read this to see how stupid those people were back then.
I am an IT specialist at a medium sized European insurance company. Not in the large datacenters or anything, just a smallish dependance. We're with only two people in my department and we work together so basically we can do with the computers at our disposal what we want.
Including installing and running bitcoin miners.
Good for you! You might think. Nice bitcoins for us, ready to spend or trade on an exchange or whatever and it doesn't cost us anything! Other than a few lost hours reading into bitcoin and then registering for a pool and setting up some miners.
But. We're not in this for the money. The ideal is what matters to us, the idea behind bitcoin, the potential it has and what it could same day become. The problem is, we don't believe in that. We both feel bitcoin is an incredibly silly idea, a waste of resources (spare me the irony, we're aware of it) and a concept that is doomed to fail.
So, we destroy every coin we mine. It's amazing how much effort it takes PC's to create a bitcoin yet how easily they can be destroyed. It literally takes us no more than a minute every week. Delete the wallet.dat and create a fresh one and another 5 coins or so are gone forever.
Miner is running on 12 PC's at the moment, total hashing power close to 700 Mhash. Next week it's time roll it out on the other 40 machines.
Of course you can join our quest and start deleting your wallets from today and help us get rid of bitcoin. Coin by coin by coin by coin!
But this genius couldn't understand the idea of scarcity: The more coins he destroys, the more valuable the remaining coins become.