TIL In 2013, WIRED destroyed 13 Bitcoins they had acquired by mining because they didn't want it to affect their journalism

Stefan Antonowicz, the head of engineering in WIRED was the one who set up the miner as an experiment, "to see what all the fuss was about."

After they had acquired 13 Bitcoins, they started to question what they should do with the Bitcoin.

It took around 13 hours to mine a single Bitcoin back in 2013 using an ordinary PC.

Some supported the view that they should donate it to a charity, and others that it should be destroyed permanently, one of them saying:

"We talked about donating it to a journalism institution, or setting it aside as a scholarship. But we decided that if we gained any benefit from it at all, it would color our future coverage of Bitcoin"

They also said that:

"The world’s most popular digital currency really is nothing more than an abstraction,”

I think to destroy so much money that could help others even for journalistic integrity is very stupid, and that they could've used it in a better way, but it's an interesting story.

An article about the story:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/in-2013-wired-destroyed-the-key-to-13-bitcoin-now-worth-760k-to-make-a-point