Irrecoverable Losses
A friend of mine recently revealed to me during a chat that he has a Solana holding valued at over $100k! That's a significant amount of money for sure, for which I congratulated him. What's more interesting is that this money was 100% free to him!
WHAT?
Yup! Years ago, he had received a token airdrop which he dumped and purchased Solana and "totally forgot" about it. One day he saw some news about Solana mooning, which triggered his memory, so he opened up the old wallet, revealing the face melting (life changing) dosh.
The crazy thing is, this isn't actually that rare these days in the world of crypto. Many people can identify with this story, even if the amounts are not that high. I for one made some few dozens of dollars from a few forgotten tokens I had sitting in my Coinbase wallet. They were earned from the Learn and Earn program on Coinbase where you watch videos and get rewarded. I had some BAT, Celo, EOS, Dai and some others. It wasn't Lambo money, but every little helps eh?
It made me think of how many wallets I downloaded and aidrop contents I took part in in those early days. The ones where you had to tweet at three friends and go through some actions. I never did receive any of those airdrops, to my knowledge, or maybe I did and just never checked. I wonder how much money I have sitting in wallets the keys of which I've lost.
I remember having a Trust wallet into which tokens may have been dropped. It was on an iPhone that I wiped, but wasn't backed up. I have no idea what my seed phrase was so I can never get at those funds ever.
This is probably good for the ecosystem because, truth be told, if I ever got those tokens, I'd dump them straight away. There is a huge chunk of Bitcoin that will never be sold because people have lost their keys, or passed away without sharing them. It's the same with Hive and other cryptos. It's a kind of involuntary burning of tokens that effectively reduces the amount of available tokens hence indirectly increasing the overall value.
So yes, it's good for the ecosystem, but it sucks when it's your tokens :)
Peace & Love,
Adé