Stefan Thomas has 200 million euros in Bitcoin … but has lost the password to access his wallet. Seeing the price of cryptocurrency soar lately, the programmer wanted to recover his money before realizing that he was unable to open the hard drive on which it is stored. A mishap that seems to happen to more and more people.
Credit: Dmitry Demidk / Unsplash
Stefan Thomas probably got up on the wrong foot the day he realized he was sitting on a gold mine without being able to touch a single penny. This programmer has a total of 7002 Bitcoins, which it stored on an IronKey hard drive for security. This type of hard disk allows you to encrypt your data and only delivers its content when the user enters the password.
Only here it is: Stefan has quite simply forgot password. A very bad news in view of the fabulous rise of Bitcoin whose price, although it experienced a heavy drop at the beginning of the week, still peaks at more than € 28,000 at the time of writing this article. In total, these are therefore almost 200 million euros currently lying dormant on a hard drive that no one has access to.
More than two tries to recover his 200 million euros
IronKey hard drives leave 10 tries to their owner before encrypting their data forever. Thomas Stefan is at his eighth attempt. He is therefore on the verge of losing his 200 million euros, if he is wrong two more times. A somewhat stressful situation that the person concerned has a hard time managing: “I would just lie down on my bed and think about it all. Then I would go to my computer with a new strategy that wouldn’t work, and I would be desperate again ”.
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And we understand it: the problem is all the more frustrating than nature, to say the least. volatile Bitcoin means that it can have lost its value before Thomas
his password, if he ever finds it. The programmer, however, can find comfort in the fact that he is far from the only one going through this unpleasant time. According to the Chainalysis company, approximately 20% of all Bitcoins are in portfolios to which their owners no longer have access.
