The estimation of that holding is around close to $200M at the current price of $28,000. While in the old articles it was around $321M or more based on the past ATH.
[...]The San Francisco software developer and CEO was an early adopter of bitcoin. Back in 2011, he produced an animated video explaining how the digital currency works. For his efforts, a bitcoin enthusiast awarded him 7,002 bitcoins.
Later that year, he lost the password to his IronKey, the USB hard drive that contains the digital wallet that holds his bitcoins. Since then, the currency's value has skyrocketed, and Thomas' holdings are worth $220 million US ($321 million Cdn.)[..]
This is him:
Photo source
While the other guy is named James Howell.
The story of this guy is different beacuse he threw away his HDD that contains 8,000 Bitcoins on 2013. He's got some proposal to use AI to clean the landfill but the management can't just agree to it.
A computer engineer who accidentally threw away a hard drive containing approximately £150m worth of bitcoin plans to use artificial intelligence to search through thousands of tonnes of landfill.
James Howells discarded the hardware from an old laptop containing 8,000 bitcoins in 2013 during an office clearout and now believes it is sitting in a rubbish dump in Newport, south Wales.
James Howells discarded the hardware from an old laptop containing 8,000 bitcoins in 2013 during an office clearout and now believes it is sitting in a rubbish dump in Newport, south Wales.
This is him:
Photo source
These are just the few of the many that have lost their Bitcoins forever while there's just little to no chance for both of them to recover it, so we can conclude that they're totally lost forever. Should they give up or accepted that they're lost forever, these lost Bitcoins are like a donation to the community as its value retained on the market capitalization of Bitcoin.
Lesson; Always back up your seed phrase, password, recovery phrases, private keys that has access to your Bitcoins and wallets.