Passwords
Almost everyone should have already had the experience of forgetting a password and being annoyed about not being able to access an account. An absolute classic is the PIN, which you enter incorrectly three times because you still know the numbers, but not the exact order.
Fortunately, thanks to password managers, two-factor authentication and the like, it is not nearly as common nowadays. One way or another, you almost always make it into your account.
Stefan Anders
But if you have created the password for 10 years or more, it sometimes gets tricky. And when 200 million euros depend on this one password, it becomes even more difficult. This has now happened to the German programmer Stefan Thomas. Because he has lost his password to a hard drive with 197,600,400 euros in the form of Bitcoin. And he only has two more password attempts before he is locked out forever.
Thomas received 7,002 bitcoins more than 10 years ago for making a video about how cryptocurrencies work. Back then, his Bitcoin collection was only worth a few pounds each, and he decided to store it in an IronKey digital wallet on a hard drive.
Lost password
He wrote the password for this hard drive on a piece of paper that he eventually lost. Now his Bitcoin is worth 197,600,400 euros (price fluctuates by a few million every day) and he can no longer remember which password he wrote down all those years ago.
Thomas has already tried eight possible passwords, whereby he only has two left before the hard drive does not allow any more attempts and he can therefore no longer get access to them.
Not the only one with a lost password
Former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos had even offered to help Thomas unlock the hard drive, but he asked for a 10% stake.
“For 197,600,400 euros in blocked Bitcoin, you don’t guess 10 passwords, but leave it to the professionals to decrypt the password”Stamos said on Twitter. “I do it for 10% of the total. Just call me”. Stamos later revised his statement, saying it was just a joke when he said he was going to unlock it.
According to cryptocurrency data company Chainanalysis, Thomas isn’t the only one locked out of his Bitcoin fortune, as there are currently 115 billion euros worth of Bitcoin that is either lost or in inaccessible wallets.
A Bitcoin today costs around 30,000 euros