Excluded
With the recent highs in the price of Bitcoin, an unfortunate phenomenon is emerging: people who have built up great luck in the cryptocurrency realize that they have long since lost the passwords for their encrypted digital wallets.
Take Stefan Thomas, a programmer in San Francisco, who told The New York Times that he hid 7,002 Bitcoin – currently worth about $ 236 million, almost a quarter of a billion dollars – but that he has no idea how to access it and can only guess two passwords before being locked out forever.
Although the long-term prospects for crypto are set aside, the key message of these horror stories is that taking digital finances into your own is a big risk if you can not manage your passwords.
Crypto startup
The problem of buying or exploiting crypto and then forgetting how to access it is so widespread that there is a whole industry going on for cybersecurity experts who can help the rich to prosper obtained after forgetting their passwords.
“Even sophisticated investors were completely incapable of managing private keys,” Diogo Monica, co-founder of crypto-security firm Anchorage, told the Associated Press. NEW.
Major Turnoff
According to Thomas and others in his situation, millions of dollars just out of reach have soured the idea of decentralized currency like Bitcoin. NEW.
“This whole idea of being your own sofa – let me put it this way: ‘Make your own shoes?’ ‘ NEW. “The reason we have banks is that we do not want to deal with all the things that banks do.”
READ MORE: Lost passwords lock millionaires out of their Bitcoin fortune [The New York Times]
More about crypto: Crypto Thief stole $ 54 million by guessing bad passwords