Spooky Tales from Crypto History

Crypto has a habit of making history around the end of October. Bitcoin itself was published on Halloween, Wall Street made its first big move into Bitcoin on Halloween, and some of the industry’s strangest stories involve lost keys, frozen funds and a consensus protocol named after a ghost. In honor of the occasion, here’s a look back at seven of them.

1. Bitcoin was born on Halloween

On Friday, October 31, 2008, at 2:10 pm EDT, Satoshi Nakamoto sent a short email titled “Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper” to the cryptography mailing list at metzdowd.com, with a link to a nine-page PDF.

That paper became the foundation of the whole industry. Satoshi’s last known public messages date to April 2011, and Satoshi’s identity is still unknown, which makes Bitcoin’s founder the most famous ghost in crypto.

2. Halloween 2017: Wall Street showed up in costume

On October 31, 2017, CME Group, the world’s largest futures exchange operator, announced it planned to launch cash-settled Bitcoin futures before year-end, pending regulatory review.

The surprise announcement pushed Bitcoin to a new record above $6,400 that day. The contracts started trading on December 18, 2017, giving institutional participants regulated Bitcoin futures on the world’s largest futures exchange.

3. “I accidentally killed it”

A week after Halloween 2017, on November 6, a GitHub user called devops199 made himself the owner of a shared library contract used by Parity multisig wallets, then triggered its self-destruct function. Every wallet that depended on that library stopped working. Parity’s post-mortem put the frozen total at 513,774.16 ETH across 587 wallets.

The user’s comment on GitHub, “I accidentally killed it“, became one of the best-known lines in Ethereum history. The user never gained access to the assets and the funds remain locked. 

4. The undead asset

There are several sites (like 99Bitcoins and Bitcoindeaths) that have been keeping a list of “Bitcoin is dead” predictions since 2010, counting only claims from people with a notable following or sites with substantial traffic. By late October 2026 the count stood at 478.

The peak year was 2017, with 124 obituaries, which was also the year Bitcoin reached a then all-time high. In 2024 only two new obituaries were added.

5. Buried treasure in a Welsh landfill

In 2013, James Howells of Newport, Wales, threw out a hard drive holding the private key to thousands of bitcoins he had mined years earlier (the tentative figure could be between 7,500 and 8,000 BTC). He spent more than a decade asking Newport City Council for permission to dig. In January 2025 a High Court judge dismissed his claim, and Howells then said he would try to buy the landfill outright. The council has said it plans to close the site.

6. Two guesses left

In 2011, programmer Stefan Thomas was paid 7,002 BTC for making a video explaining Bitcoin. He stored the keys on an IronKey, an encrypted drive that permanently locks its contents after ten wrong passwords. He lost the paper with the password and has already used eight attempts.

He had also erased two backup copies. When The New York Times reported the story in January 2021, he had two guesses left, and there has been no report of the drive being opened since.

7. The GHOST of Ethereum

Ethereum’s proof-of-stake consensus is called Gasper, which consists of two components: LMD GHOST (Latest Message Driven Greediest Heaviest Observed SubTree), the fork-choice rule validators use to agree on the head of the chain, and Casper FFG (the Friendly Finality Gadget), which finalizes blocks. So every validator Everstake runs on Ethereum follows a GHOST and a Casper.

The treat at the end

Looking back at these stories, the common lesson is that the safety of any asset depends on how well its keys, backups and infrastructure are managed. From all of us at Everstake, Happy Halloween, and wishing you a season of steady uptime and secure staking!