Two Wrong Guesses And This Programmer Loses USD 241M in Bitcoin
- par Xavier Trudeau
- dans Financer
- — Jan 14, 2021
We've all been there - brain fog makes us forget our password and after eight frantic attempts, we have just two left.
His plight, reported in the New York Times, has gone viral.
There are those, like ex-Facebook security head Alex Stamos who have offered to help Thomas unlock the hard drive, but he is asking for a 10% cut.
Over the years, the volatile Bitcoin has surged in value and now, one bitcoin is worth $34,000.
According to a report by The Guardian, Stefan Thomas has two remaining chances to enter the correct password for accessing a bitcoin wallet containing 7,002 BTC ($240 million).
But the cryptocurrency is volatile.
Stefan Thomas, a German-born computer programmer based in San Francisco, was given 7,002 Bitcoins more than ten years ago as a reward for recording a video explaining how the cryptocurrency works.
At the time, they were worth a few dollars each. In fact, there are an estimated 18.5 million Bitcoin, totaling almost $140 billion, lost because the private keys went missing or the wallet owners died without passing the codes to someone else.
Thomas said he was drawn to Bitcoin partly because the currency sat outside of the control of either a country or a company.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the dilemma has put him off cryptocurrencies. "The reason we have banks is that we don't want to deal with all those things that banks do", Thomas said. "I'll make it happen for 10%".
Mr. Thomas will not be the first person to lose his bitcoin, if he does, as other exceptional cases have been documented.
Thomas is not alone in being locked out from his Bitcoin fortune, as there is now $140 billion worth of Bitcoin that is either lost or left in wallets that can not be accessed, according to cyrptocurrency-data company Chainanalysis. In fact, businesses such as Wallet Recovery Services which specialise in tracking down missing keys have been receiving over 70 requests a day - three times the amount from a month ago. He accidentally threw away the hard disk that contained the bitcoin private keys.
At the time worth more than £4m, this would now be valued at more than £250m.
