German prosecutors have reportedly seized about 1,700 bitcoin from a bitcoin miner, but the man will not give them his password to unlock the crypto-currency.
“We asked him, but he did not say,” prosecutor Sebastian Murer told Reuters on Friday. “Maybe he does not know.”
At Saturday’s bitcoin price, the stock was worth about $ 67.9 million.
The bitcoin miner, originally from Kempten, Bavaria, was not mentioned in the report. He was sentenced to two years in prison, according to Reuters, after installing bitcoin mining software on others’ computers and using it remotely to build a sum of bitcoin.
He reportedly kept his mined bitcoin in a password-protected digital wallet, which is a common way to own the digital currency.
Without the password, there is no way to open a digital wallet.
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Last month, another man in Germany had a bitcoin deposit of about $ 220 million that was made inaccessible because he lost his password. In January, a man from the Welsh city of Newport said he mistakenly threw away about 7,500 bitcoin, worth about $ 275 million.
About $ 140 billion in bitcoin, or about 20% of all bitcoin, is trapped in wallets because they forgot their passwords, according to The New York Times.
As the crypto-currency has risen over the past few months, excluded owners have seen the value rise. Bitcoin reached $ 40,000 for the first time last month, then $ 41,000, before retiring. It has climbed again since then and according to CoinDesk it was $ 39,982.81 24 hours a day.