https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55645408 "We've all been there - brain fog makes us forget our password and after eight frantic attempts, we have just two left. That's the situation for programmer Stefan Thomas but the stakes are higher than most - the forgotten password will let him unlock a hard drive containing $240m (£175m) worth of Bitcoin. His plight, reported in the New York Times, has gone viral. Ex-Facebook security head Alex Stamos has offered to help - for a 10% cut. Bitcoin tops $34,000 as record rally continues Cryptocurrency: Bitcoin hits three-year high as investors jump in Man searches for hard drive with £4m worth of bitcoins stored Bitcoin has surged in value in recent months. ... Mr Thomas, who was born in Germany but lives in San Francisco, was given 7,002 bitcoins as payment for making a video explaining how cryptocurrency works more than a decade ago. At the time, they were worth a few dollars each. He stored them in an IronKey digital wallet on a hard drive. And he wrote the password on a piece of paper he has lost. Own bank After 10 failed attempts, the password will encrypt itself, making the wallet impossible to access. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the dilemma has put him off cryptocurrencies. He told the New York Times: "The whole idea of being your own bank - let me put it this way, do you make your own shoes?" "The reason we have banks is that we don't want to deal with all those things that banks do."
I mined bitcoin in 2011 and got a whole shit of it except there is no way to get it. I saved the bitcoin wallet on my computer...
Better than this guy who threw all his bitcoins to the trash and had to literally go to the landfill site to try to recover them and didn't find them... That 10% cut is steep just for two passwords. Oh well, greed is what pays nowadays...
Basackwards. If it were me I paid the "greedy" guy the 10% rather than lose the 100%. Oh BTW I posted this story this morning on the Bitcoin thread - like Barron and Magna requested. Now if only RedditMan/Pekolo follows along as well, he's started at least 3-5 Bitcoin threads in last 2 days alone.
is still too steep. He should do it for free or charge the standard rate, what is it? $25 per hour? Should the value of what he will be retrieving for his "client" matter? If so, then he should do it for free for somebody who just needs to extract passwords to an ordinary Word document from his hard drive because 10% of 0 is $0. What if he didn't know what he will be retrieving from the guy's hard drive? It could be passwords to anything. Just because now he knows how much what he will be retrieving is worth he is entitled to charge an astronomical fee?
Frankly, at this point, I think I'd be looking for the paper I wrote the password on, rather than guessing.
Imagine you deposit your life savings in a digital bank. And later you forget your password. Then all your $$$$ will be totally gone.