A German-born programmer in San Francisco has now used eight of the ten password attempts to unlock the hard drive with the private keys of his Bitcoin wallet, which contains 7,002 Bitcoin (BTC). As of press time, the investment would be worth $ 268 million – that is, if only it were accessible.
As stated in a New York Times profile on January 12, Stefan Thomas uses a hard drive called ‘IronKey’, but loses the paper on which he wrote down the password for the device ‘years ago’. If Thomas can not remember it, ten guesses will lead to the coding of the content forever. He has so far tried eight guesses without any luck.
‘I’ll just lie in bed and think about it. Then I would go to the computer with a new strategy, and it would not work, and I would be desperate again. ‘
It is estimated that almost 20% of all existing Bitcoin – 18.5 million BTC – has been lost in so-called ‘stranded’ wallets, according to Chainalysis data. Thomas is not alone in his self-lost desperation: a Los Angeles entrepreneur, Brad Yasar, told the Times that “over the years” I would say I’d spent hundreds of hours trying to get back into inaccessible wallets.
Yasar hid his hard drives “in vacuum-sealed bags” so that he was no longer “reminded every day that what I have now is a fraction of what I can have that I have lost.”
No story is unusual: Wallet Recovery Services, a company that specializes in recovering lost digital keys, reportedly receives 70 requests a day from clients seeking help. It is three times higher than before the bull market.
Thomas’ experience has apparently turned him down on the concept of a technology that places the duty on individual users to take control of their finances – with all the freedom and risks that come with it. Having originally received the 7,0002 BTC as a gift in exchange for producing a video to teach people about the currency, he is now skeptical about leaving users with a degree of control:
‘This whole idea of being your own couch – let me put it this way: Make your own shoes? The reason we have banks is that we do not want to deal with all the things that banks do. ”
Aside from his extraordinary losses, over the years, Thomas has held on to enough Bitcoin to earn a fortune – he is apparently so rich that he hardly knows what to do with it, to describe the report. He also later joined Ripple and acquired XRP, although the company’s recent legal problems could cast a shadow over the project’s future prospects.
The report notes that similar risks exist when users entrust their supervisors to third parties – with reference to Mt. Gox and other crimes in the industry – but does contain input from those who believe that digital currency compromises are worth it at the end of the day.
Although he has lost 800 BTC in the past, an entrepreneur in Barbados claimed that “the risk of being my own bank has the reward of having free access to my money and being a citizen of the world.” His view, from a corner of the world where financial inclusion is a source of concern, provides insight into why many people may continue to think so.