The ninth time there is a charm? For Stefan Thomas, that is the $ 220-million question.
A San Francisco programmer, according to the New York Times, owns 7,002 BTCUSD bitcoins,
in a digital wallet that can’t access because, well, it lost the password. He has tried to measure up to eight useless times. Now he has only two more chances or his fortune will be gone.
The hard drive where its bitcoin is stored, called IronKey, allows users 10 attempts to crack the code before submitting the content forever. Understandably, it has been a difficult time for Thomas, who lost the piece of paper with the password years ago.
“I would just lie in bed and think about it,” he told the Times in an interview. “Then I would go to the computer with a new strategy, and it wouldn’t work, and I would be terrible again. ”
Thomas isn’t the only password away from bitcoin’s wealth. According to Chainalysis, about 20% of the existing 18.5 million bitcoins, worth $ 140 billion, appear to be lost in digital wallets.
Like many bitcoin enthusiasts, Thomas was drawn to the cryptocurrency partly because it was not controlled by a traditional country or bank. Now, he has second thoughts. “The whole idea of being your own bank – let me put it like this, ‘Do you make your own shoes? ”He said. “The reason we have banks is we don’t want to deal with those things that banks do. ”
But don’t feel too bad for Thomas. He has kept enough bitcoin to “get richer than he knows what to do,” the Times reported. He has also invested in Ripple XRPUSD,
cryptocurrency startup business that went back in 2012.
At last survey on Tuesday, bitcoin was trading above $ 34,000 and is now up about 320% over the past year, while the S&P 500 SPX,
has received 17%.