2022 is bad enough with Omicron, a polar vortex, and fires, indoor and out. Now my Twitter feed is bloated with people bragging about their scores in a stupid word game.

The Plain View

During the holiday break, I was clearing out some detritus that had gathered over the years. Nestled in a stack of documents I had put aside for shredding was an envelope of receipts from a 2014 reporting trip. Before submitting it to the grinding blades, I peeked inside—and found a printout from a strange ATM I had used in August of that year. I knew instantly what it was because every so often I had done a cursory search for that printout. I had ultimately concluded that it was lost and I was out the $20 I had put into the machine—and the considerably larger sum the receipt was worth now. Finally, I would learn exactly how much.

But first let’s go back to August 19, 2014. It was the semi-annual Y Combinator Demo Day, held at the Computer History Museum, and 80 startups were presenting. (That batch has a mixed record, though one went public last year at a $15 billion valuation.) To avoid reporting conflicts, I don’t invest in tech. But on that day, a startup called Bitaccess made me pull out my wallet. That was the company that set up an ATM in the museum lobby and invited visitors to buy bitcoins on the spot.

Bitaccess was cofounded by a Canadian named Mo Adham and three partners. In early 2014, after quitting a boring job, he pursued an obsession with cryptocurrency. Working in his parents’ basement one night, he took a borrowed kiosk and reprogrammed it to sell bitcoins. It wasn’t the first time this trick had been done: In October 2013, a firm called Robocoin had installed a Bitcoin ATM in a Vancouver coffee shop. The first customer, Jason Lamarche, bought $20 worth of currency and immediately squandered part of it on a steamed milk with vanilla, served by the Bitcoin-friendly establishment. (Reached last week, Larmache declined to comment.) Though the idea has been slow to take off, the recent boom has made cryptocurrency a more common investment, and there are now an estimated 30,000 ATMs selling bitcoins in the US.

But in 2014, it was very much a novelty. Adham, who still runs the company (his cofounders are gone) tells me that during Demo Day that year, Bitaccess sold $930 worth of bitcoins to 65 people. The currency itself came from the personal stash of the company founders, who, by today’s valuation, splurged more than $90,000 for their stunt. To date, fewer than half the purchases from that day have been moved from the easy-to-lose printouts to digital wallets, indicating a lot of lost receipts. The biggest purchase—$200—was moved to a wallet in 2016, but the next two biggest buys of $100 each have been dormant. 

One of those $100 buyers was Austin Neudecker, who attended Demo Day as a YC alumnus. “I came home with this receipt and didn't treat it very well,” he says. “I think it degraded over time, and I don't know if a cleaner at some point slipped it into the trash or something. But it basically disappeared.” Along with what would be $10,000 worth of bitcoins today. Another customer was Doktor Gurson, whose company also presented that day. He stuffed the printout for his $20 investment into his jacket pocket and never saw it again. At one point he asked his wife, who had videoed his own demo, to screen the recording to see what jacket he wore that day. But the pockets were empty.

And me? I just wanted to see how Bitcoin worked. I put a $20 bill in the machine and got two pieces of paper, one of them a transaction receipt and the other a printout with two QR codes. Those codes represent public and private keys with the blockchain information that verified my claim to just over 4 percent of a bitcoin. I didn’t remember sticking those papers into the envelope; instead I vaguely recalled stashing them in a closet. Every so often I’d dig around, but to no avail. Eventually, I abandoned hope. Whatever happened, it wouldn’t be as costly as the time WIRED intentionally wiped its private key to 13 bitcoins it had mined in 2013, which now would have been worth about $567,000.

But now I’d found my receipt, and I wondered if it would still work. I got in touch with Adham, and he walked me through the process of moving my investment to a wallet. That $20 was now worth almost $2,000.