Norwegian buys flat with forgotten €17.4 bitcoin investment boost

A Norwegian man who purchased €17.4 worth of bitcoins and then promptly forgot about it for four years, was able to buy an apartment in central Oslo thanks to massive appreciation of the virtual currency.

In 2009, Kristoffer Koch was doing research on encryption and on a whim decided to invest a small sum in the recently created bitcoins — a means of payment over the Internet.

Koch, now 29 and working as an engineer, only remembered the investment in April of this year when he read an article about the soaring value of bitcoins.