After two more failed attempts, the password to his digital wallet will encrypt itself. https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/m...re-232-million-is-lost-forever-222045101.html Back when Bitcoin was worth only $5 a coin, Stefan Thomas was paid 7,002 of them for making a video explaining how the cryptocurrency worked, which was promptly stored in a digital wallet. Thomas stored the private keys to access the wallet on a small hard drive, which was also password protected. That password, however, was written on a piece of paper and sadly lost. The 7,002 Bitcoin are now worth more than $232 million and Thomas has just two attempts left to guess the password before it's encrypted and lost forever. "I would just lay in bed and think about it," Thomas told The New York Times. "Then I would go to the computer with some new strategy, and it wouldn't work, and I would be desperate again." Strangely, this is not the first time someone has lost millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin. Welshman James Howells accidentally threw out a hard drive filled with around $265 million worth of Bitcoin. Howells has not given up his search in the local dump, hopeful that one day he will find his hard drive.
I think the irony would be if these guys were so careful about their passwords, they would've sold a long time ago.
Sounds like utter bullshit to me. First he lost the password to decrypt the hard drive. At the end of the article the entire hard drive was lost? Those loser "content creators" who only steal others' actual content and then in their attempt to "enrich" it actually totally fuck it up.
It was two different people but how can anyone not keep track of a password for financial info, even if the BTC was not worth very much in the beginning. I remember when people were giving BTC away for free.
The story of the guy with only two attempts left, and the other guy who lost his HD are ancient stories in the crypto world by now. But they keep popping up here all the time as 'news' by those who are way behind the curve. In any case, they do make one supporting argument for why Canadian financial institutions started making Bitcoin (and Ethereum) exchange traded funds long ago. You cant really expect senior investors to keep track of this, considering many baby-boomers can't even figure out where they left their car-keys, or what side of the road they should drive on. The other side of the argument, what if a clumsy institution gets involved somewhere in the pipeline, and then the loss of keys or some other 'fuck-up' occurs? The case of FireBlocks losing close to a hundred million bucks due to fucking up their Ethereum-keys is one of many examples recently... IIRC there was another institution quite a while back, that fat-fingered/mis-interpreted their smart-contract and got the unlocking date wrong by factors in the thousands, meaning life of the planet may be gone before the deposits could be reversed. Doh! Perhaps, institutions really should stay the %*@$ away from cryptos and stick to just losing FIAT money the traditional way.
Its not Bitcoins fault the man lost his password. What does this have to do with any of us? It would be extreme stupidity to lose a wallet key
Been in a similar situation with an encrypted drive. Obviously only losing data is much less significant. A horrible position to have.