Stefan Thomas, a programmer who lives in San Francisco, lost the password to his Bitcoin account – and now he has only two attempts left to unlock before the drive is fully encrypted. If he fails to do so, he could lose some 7,000 coins worth $ 240 million today
NEXTER
| Published 13/01/21 14:35 | Updated 13/01/21 15:23
Stefan Thomas, a German programmer living in San Francisco, has lost the password to his Bitcoin account – and now he has only two attempts left to unlock it and release his 7,002 coins. If he does not succeed, he will lose $ 240 million in capital.
A painful memory. I hope others can learn from my mistakes. Test your backups regularly to make sure they are still working. An ounce of foresight could have prevented a decade of regret.
That said, I’ll do what I always do which is focus on building things, eg @Interledger. https://t.co/pCgObeAf4Z
– Stefan Thomas (@justmoon) January 12, 2021
In an interview with the New York Times, Thomas said he received the coins as payment for a video explaining their mechanism of action, which he produced a decade ago. At the time, the value of Bitcoin ranged from two dollars to six dollars, so he chose to store the coins in his digital wallet and went on with his life.
After realizing that Bitcoin had jumped by thousands of percent, he asked for the money to be released, and realized that he had forgotten the password. Now, after eight incorrect attempts, he has only two attempts left before his encrypted drive, Iron Key, will be locked and automatically encrypted. In this case, he may never see the money. “I would just lie in bed and think about it,” he repeated in an interview, “and then I would go back to the computer with a new strategy. This whole idea of being your own bank is just like making your own shoes. There are banks in the world because we don’t want to deal with all the things banks do. We are dealing with them. “
The desperate plight of Thomas, who does hold another pool of coins, has made headlines in the world’s major newspapers. Following the exposure, offers began to flow in from cyber people who promised to decipher the device’s password for part of the capital I would store in it. “If you are locked in more than $ 200 million worth of bitcoin, you are not trying to enter a password ten times, but taking it to professionals who will spend six months trying to find a loophole through it,” Alex Stamos, a network security expert at Stanford University, wrote on Twitter. “I’m going to make it happen for 10 percent of the profit.”
Um, for $ 220M in locked-up Bitcoin, you do not make 10 password guesses but take it to professionals to buy 20 IronKeys and spend six months finding a side-channel or uncapping.
I’ll make it happen for 10%. Call me. https://t.co/dTumE8Cw65
– Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) January 12, 2021
There are currently about 18.6 million Bitcoin coins in the world, which can be divided into one hundred million parts each. The production rate currently stands at 8.6 coins every ten minutes, and will go down until production ceases in 2040, with the target number of 21 million coins. The purpose for which the restriction was set is to prevent inflation, but the currency still jumped 700 percent this year alone, reaching a record value of more than $ 40,000 per currency, and dropped back to $ 34,000.
According to Chainalysis, which collects information about digital currencies, no less than 20 percent of the 18.5 million Bitcoin currencies were locked in accounts to which access was lost. Thus, in 2013 a British IT man threw away a drive that included keys for 7,500 coins. At the time it was lost at £ 4 million, it is now more than $ 250 million.