Is there a way to destroy the private keys? If they did, are we sure there was no one who made a back up of it somewhere and secretly?

Anyway it seems it is true since that happened several years ago. And there was no movement ever since. If this is the case then the amount will indeed go down the drain together with the lost and totally forgotten Bitcoins. That makes Bitcoin more scarce than its 21 million fixed supply.

You can provably destroy bitcoin. You send them to an address that makes them un-spendable. It's called proof of burn. 

That's true, but what I think Wired meant with "destroyed" is that they simply got rid of the credentials or forgot them. So, in return "destroying" them, but not something that can be verified. Unless, you consider that the coins haven't moved since, verification.

Depends on where their moral compass is at, but also their confidence tackling the legality side of things. I wouldn't know who would be considered the owner, since Wired stated they destroyed or discarded their coins, surely that's giving up ownership? Although, then there's the issue that Wired employs journalists, or writers to write about these sort of things, so they could probably argue that the employee opened a wallet on their behalf, and discarded the coins without permission.

Obviously, this is speculation since none of us know the exact situation of how this happened. I'm sure they are well aware of that situation now.

I guess they just deleted it.

You are right about the scarcity and the 21m supply. The real total supply is much lower due to lost keys, forgotten wallets and keys, confiscated coins and other similar reasons. There are speculations that 10%-15% of all coins are lost forever.

If they really did 'destroy' it, I wonder how much of an idiot they think of themselves right now. The author could have just created a backup for that wallet and just not told anyone that they didn't do it and reap the rewards later. This surely adds to that statistics of people regretting their actions in the past about bitcoin. That's still 13 bitcoins all in all lost in limbo, that could easily buy you a car and get you a vacation to somewhere nice (away from COVID as well). Welp, I guess some people are really just that thick, and I couldn't blame them though--they never knew back then that it will get this big. Thank those guys at WIRED for making bitcoin scarcer by 13 full coins, though

Its not just Bitcoin either, this is one instance where history has repeated itself over, and over. Some people overlooked the importance of the internet as a recent example, which now dominates probably the majority of the populations time. I believe people are cautious by nature, and therefore tend to not like change. Therefore, they stick with what they know, and there's a few pioneer within the world which start to bring the adoption to the masses, until it catches on like a wildfire.

Hopefully, we don't only just seen Bitcoin skyrocketing in the near future, but we also see more adoption in mainstream companies, since those (pioneers) would be exposing the Blockchain, and Bitcoin to more users. Paypal recently had this effect with them adopting Bitcoin, I've heard numerous people around me talk about Bitcoin, because now all of a sudden they trust it a little bit more that a company like Paypal has shown interest in it.

Although, hearing this is quite entertaining, because of the way they rubbished Bitcoin, I wouldn't laugh at them. They were very close to actually discovering something extremely profitable, or if they broadened their minds a little more, something much more important than that.

But it's not really bad to be conservative, if we started throwing our resources at everything novel, the economy would be very inefficient, and scammers would be thriving, like it was with ICO and altcoins. It's only bad when someone is stubborn about adopting new tech after it has already succeeded, but in this case 2013 was still very early days when the future of Bitcoin was unclear.

He wanted to be the cool kid in the yard and just shame BTC but in the end BTC shamed him 

Don't rub it in mate, 


They probably did but totally destroyed everything and not thinking that Bitcoin will be huge in just less than ten years. But you can't really blame them though, that time as Bitcoin is still in it's nascent stage and for them maybe it was just a fad that will go away, hence, some little experiments gone bad after many years.

They might be burning from inside out to death by seeing such hike in the bitcoin today. I guess there are many more such vases in the history who has gained and lost the bitcoins in the first place. From pizza delivery boy to waitress sisters all of them have done the same and they fought for their dimes in the later stages.

We can't really imagine or track all the bitcoin wallets which are dead right now. By dead I really mean lost private keys and stuff.

Considering the complexity of blockchain and wallet functions I barely doubt they will be ever recovered by us.  


LOL. Seriously don't.