Stefan Thomas - Bitcoin Millionaire Desperate For Forgotten Password

Thomas said that he tried entering the password eight times, and only had two more attempts to enter the password for the USB, which contains the password to unlock the wallet that made him a millionaire. The price of Bitcoin at the time of writing this article is more than 34,400 USD, and the amount of Bitcoin over 7000 dong that Thomas owns is worth nearly 270 million USD.

Midway through last week, The New York Times ran an article about Stefan Thomas, a programmer in San Francisco who doesn't know if he's the luckiest or the unluckiest in the world. Mr. Thomas in 2011 was given more than 7,000 Bitcoins, the value of each BTC was only 30 US cents a coin. He stored this amount of virtual currency in an electronic wallet, keeping the private key to unlock this electronic wallet in a secure USB drive also known as IronKey. The problem is, the paper where Thomas wrote the password to open this IronKey has been lost, and it only tells him to enter the password exactly 10 times before permanently encrypting the contents inside the USB.

Thomas said that he tried entering the password eight times, and only had two more attempts to enter the password for the USB, which contains the password to unlock the wallet that made him a millionaire. The price of Bitcoin at the time of writing this article is more than 34,400 USD, and the amount of Bitcoin over 7000 dong that Thomas owns is worth nearly 270 million USD. Thomas lamented that:

"I just lay in bed and think about it. Then I went back to the computer to come up with a new strategy, but it didn't work, and then I felt hopeless again."

Thomas isn't one of the young men who have gone underground with Bitcoin. In 2013, an IT specialist in the UK dumped a hard drive with 7,500 Bitcoins in it, which is suspected to be located in a giant landfill near the city. As of this week, the same IT professional has promised to donate $73 million if the city government allows him to organize a search for the discarded hard drive.

A lot of people have owned a lot of Bitcoins since the early days a decade ago, when no one believed they would have any value, but now they feel helpless trying to access their own assets.

It is true that "if you don't keep it, don't find it", but no one expected that Bitcoins sometimes cost up to billions of dong.

Another more ironic case is the sudden death of the CEO of Quadriga, Gerald Cotton, making the e-wallet containing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoins that only Cotton who holds the password can no longer access and transact. According to an estimate by Chainalysis, about 20% of all Bitcoins in existence on the free market have been completely lost, in inaccessible digital wallets. This amount of Bitcoin is worth about 140 billion USD, at current exchange rates.

Back to the story of Thomas. As a technologist, he was attracted to Bitcoin in part because the currency is not controlled by the government. In 2011, while living in Switzerland, he was given more than 7,000 Bitcoins by someone. That same year, Thomas lost his wallet login password.

"I realized that it's best to keep the money in the bank. If there is a problem, they will solve it for you ", Thomas pensive. Like Thomas, many crypto believers often have problems with account security. However, they chose to take a different approach: Hire an outside company to hold Bitcoins to store their accounts.

However, this is not a perfect measure in the crypto world. Even some major exchanges like Mt. Gox has also had its account hacked. Gabriel Abed, 34, an entrepreneur from Barbados, lost about 800 Bitcoins - now worth about $25 million - when a colleague reinstalled his laptop containing the Bitcoin wallet password in 2011.

In the case of Abed and Thomas, the loss that came from forgetting the password was partly offset by a large gain. The roughly 800 Bitcoins that Abed lost in 2011 are just a fraction of the tokens he has traded since then. Currently, this man has money to buy a plot of land for more than 25 million USD in Barbados.

The reason so many Bitcoins are lost is because the system is not controlled by a single person or organization, so there is almost no protection mechanism to prevent this huge amount of virtual currency from disappearing. forever. If crypto players keep their assets in decentralized wallets, then losing their password is also considered a loss of money.

After 8 tumultuous months, Bitcoin became a huge "gold mine" for many investors, at the time when the Covid-19 epidemic weakened the world economy. Although the price of Bitcoin has plummeted earlier this week (January 11), the cryptocurrency is still up more than 50% month-on-month and is hovering at $33,000 per coin.

Unlike other traditional assets, Bitcoin - as an electronic asset - also has many potential risks if investors accidentally forget the wallet password. Like Thomas, these people can only watch their properties increase helplessly without being able to sell them for hundreds of millions of dollars in cash.

Of the 18.5 million Bitcoins currently on the market, about 20% — worth about $140 billion — are in hacked accounts or have forgotten passwords, according to data from company Chainalysis. Several organizations that provide wallet recovery or password recovery services say they receive about 70 requests a day from Bitcoin players when the price of the coin suddenly increased 2-3 times compared to a month ago.

Bitcoin owners whose wallets are locked speak of endless frustration as they try to access their vast wealth. Many people have owned Bitcoins since the cryptocurrency's early days a decade ago, when no one believed they had any value.

Brad Yasar, an entrepreneur in Los Angeles (USA), owns thousands of Bitcoins. Holding assets worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but Yasar was completely helpless due to losing the e-wallet password many years ago. "What I have today is only a fraction of what I lost," he lamented.

The creator of Bitcoin, known as Satoshi Nakamoto, is the mysterious man who invented the world's first cryptocurrency in 2008. According to this person, the idea of Bitcoin is to allow anyone to around the world can open digital bank accounts and hold assets in a way that no government can prevent or regulate.

The Bitcoin network can confirm the accuracy of passwords and allow investors to execute trading orders without having to store personal information. Thus, users are allowed to create Bitcoin wallets without having to register with a financial institution or go through any identity verification steps.

It is this vulnerability that has made the Bitcoin market an active area for criminals. They can own money without revealing their identity. But the more serious flaw - coming from Bitcoin's lax system - is that players will lose everything if they accidentally lose their passwords.

Bà trùm rửa Bitcoin lớn nhất lịch sử nước Anh bỏ trốn, đồng đội làm vật thế mạng Đình Như15:32:51 18/04/2024Người phụ nữ tên Giản Văn (Trung Quốc) bị phát hiện tham gia vào đường dây rửa tiền bitcoin lớn nhất lịch sử nước Anh. Tuy nhiên, bà trùm bí ẩn đứng sau lại là 1 người khác.