Student’s forgotten $27 Bitcoin investment turns into $594 million fortune
Kristoffer Koch's college project led to a life-changing windfall after Bitcoin's explosive rise in value
A Norwegian student who spent $27 on Bitcoin for a school project in 2009 later discovered his tiny investment had ballooned into a fortune worth hundreds of millions.
In 2009, 25-year-old Kristoffer Koch was a student researching digital currencies when he stumbled across Bitcoin, a new and little-known concept at the time. Out of curiosity—and with no real expectations—he invested around $27 to purchase 5,000 Bitcoins.
At the time, Bitcoin had no real-world value. “You could barely use it to buy anything except alpaca socks,” Koch later joked. After making the purchase, he put the digital wallet aside and forgot about it.
A surprising rediscovery years later
Four years passed. Then in 2013, Koch began seeing headlines about Bitcoin’s meteoric rise. He dusted off his old wallet and discovered that his small investment had skyrocketed to around $850,000.
But there was a catch: he had forgotten the password. After a tense period, he successfully retrieved it—unlocking access to what would become life-changing wealth.
Koch sold a fifth of his holdings that year, paid taxes, and bought a high-end apartment in Oslo. The remaining coins—if left untouched—would now be worth over $475 million.
“I never imagined this outcome,” he says
In interviews, Koch described the experience as surreal. “Not in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that they would have soared like this,” he said. “It’s bizarre, these psychological reflexes that make us attach a value to something that doesn’t have any in itself.”
What started as a school assignment turned into one of the most fortunate accidental investments in Bitcoin history. Today, Koch’s story remains a powerful reminder of how unpredictable the future of technology—and finance—can be.
