A Norwegian man who bought $27 worth of bitcoins in 2009 and forgot about them discovered their value had since shot up - to $980,000 at today's price.

Kristoffer Koch decided to buy 5,000 bitcoins for only 150 Norwegian kroner ($26.60) in 2009, after discovering bitcoin as part of an encryption thesis he was working on.

Koch probably didn't think he would become wealthy as a result, but his 5,000 BTC has turned into a goldmine. It was a wise investment by someone who stumbled across bitcoin before many others did.

Koch found that his bitcoins were worth 5 million Norwegian kroner ($886,000) when he checked back in on them. At the current Bitcoin Price Index of $196, those coins are now worth about $980,000.

After purchasing the 5,000 bitcoins, Koch pretty much forgot about them altogether. That is, until the price shot up to over $200 back in April and he started seeing press coverage about bitcoin's rise.

"I thought to myself, didn't I have something like that?" Koch told NRK, a Norwegian news outlet.

He did, and after figuring out the password to his wallet and seeing how valuable those bitcoins had become, he sold off a portion of them. Now he has an apartment that he purchased in an expensive part of Oslo, Norway. All thanks to the huge price gain that bitcoin has experienced, mostly in the past year.

It turns out that Koch's frivolous technology spending, against his girlfriend's wishes, actually turned out to be a great investment.

“I buy a lot of technical little things that I never have time to use, and this was the worst of all, the fact that I was buying fake money," Koch told NRK.

It’s not fake anymore, at least not to Kristoffer Koch.

Many people have become wealthy as a result of bitcoin's rise, although stories like this are rarely in the public eye. There's the story on the Bitcointalk forums about Kevin, who purchased 259,684 BTC for under $3,000 in 2011.

Then there is Erik Voorhees, who founded the bitcoin gambling site Satoshi Dice and sold it for 126,315 BTC, worth about $24.7 million at the current bitcoin price.

And The Verge reported earlier this year that Satoshi Nakamoto, the Bitcoin network’s mysterious founder, has an address with over one million bitcoins.

Of course, we shouldn't forget about the person who bought two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins back in 2009. Now, if only that person had kept them, or perhaps forgot about them and rediscovered them years later like Kristoffer Koch did.

Featured image: antanacoins / Flickr