An anonymous reader writes: Back in 2013, the halcyon days of at-home Bitcoin mining, staffers in the WIRED San Francisco office turned on one of Butterfly Labs' mining machines and let it whir away, amassing a horde of 13 bitcoins -- now worth $100,000. But today we have nothing to show for our efforts. What happened to our loot? The same thing that has happened to millions of other unfortunate miners, actually: We lost our private key, a 64-digit string of random numbers that not one of us remembers. And we've got basically no chance of recovering it: "Originally I was going to say that the closest metaphor I have is that we dropped a car key somewhere in the Atlantic," says Stefan Antonowicz, WIRED's then-head of engineering. "But I think it's closer for me to say we dropped the key somewhere between here and the Alpha Centauri."

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