We are all guilty of forgetting a password or to. But for one man, that simple mistake is perhaps the most expensive of its kind on a record.
Stefan Thomas, a San Francisco-based programmer, was among the first to acquire Bitcoin and now has an account exploding with more than $ 200 million worth of the rapidly growing and popular cryptocurrency in value. The problem? Only two incorrect passwords lead to a permanent loss of access, according to a new report in The New York Times. And he is not alone.
Thomas received around 7,000 coins from an early investor in the company for an explanatory video showing how the frontier currency would then work. With every $ 35,700 worth of Bitcoin at the time of publication, Thomas ’stash is now worth $ 249.9 million. His asset key is on IronKey, a password-encrypted flash driver. The problem is that it has entered the wrong password eight times, and 10 incorrect entries would cause the IronKey to delete its content. Thomas is looking at other avenues to get to Bitcoin’s fortunes.
The price of Bitcoin has skyrocketed in recent months.
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But that task may be more difficult than it sounds. While most passwords are easy enough to reset with a simple email, Bitcoin is not that easy. It is decentralized and anonymous in nature which means that there is no standard way to recover a forgotten password. The Times report that, as a result of this very topic, nearly one in five Bitcoins is permanently lost; the total value of these track coins is $ 140 billion.
Bitcoin has had an interesting path so late. Although it peaked at the end of 2017, it has spent most of the past two years declining sharply sinking as low as $ 3,263 as of December 2018. How the stock market and all things digital was a pandemic going on through 2020, it saw a rapid turnaround that brought it to its highest peak. But there is already talk that this shiny bubble is about to burst.