Delivering Takeout for 12 Years, and Losing $15 Million

Today, I was scrolling through Twitter and saw a story that really hit me.

He is 31 years old. In a city in southern China, he delivers takeout. He earns $400 a month, rents an old, run-down apartment, and even on rainy nights he’s out on the street taking orders.

He has a very old Samsung phone. The screen has already started to yellow. Inside is a wallet storing 150 bitcoins—worth $15 million at today’s market price.

That was something he bought back in 2013, on a whim. Back then, Bitcoin was only a few dozen dollars per coin. He set a pattern password lock screen and thought that would keep it safe. Later, the phone was phased out, so he put that old device away in a drawer.

Then, later on, Bitcoin rose. He took the phone back out, charged it, and powered it on. The pattern password—he forgot it.

It’s been 12 years. Every day, after he delivers the meals home, he washes up and then sits at a small table, drawing the pattern over and over again. He starts with 3 dots, then 4, then 5—tries up to 9 dots. He fills up one sheet of paper, then switches to another.

Some of the riders in the takeout delivery group know about it and urge him to send it to a professional unlocking service. He said he’d asked around. On old Samsung models, the data encryption is pretty unforgiving—messing with it could end up locking it permanently, with no chance left even to try.

So he keeps drawing it, again and again. One order earns only a few dollars in tips. Late into the night, the paper is covered in crooked, tangled lines.

Someone filmed a 12-second video—only his hands and that phone in the frame. The caption is eight Chinese characters: “After 12 years, you’re still trying—don’t lose the password.” It has 800,000 plays on Bilibili in a week.

$15 million is locked inside glass and metal no bigger than the palm of his hand—by a forgotten pattern lock. And yet he’s still riding an electric scooter, rushing to the next red light in a downpour.

He probably will never be able to open it.

$BTC