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German-born Stefan Thomas, now living in San Francisco, told the New York Times that one of the earliest cryptocurrency fans in 2011 donated 7002 bitcoins to him for the creation of the programmer of the informational film “What are Bitcoins? ? “.
However, in the same year, he lost the password to his digital wallet, called a digital key, and despite trying all the usual combinations, he was still unable to achieve it and the price of the cryptocurrency jumped over the last month.
“He was lying in bed trying to remember,” Thomas said. “Then I went to the computer with a new strategy, but it didn’t work, and I found myself back on the ice.”
Although Thomas kept bitcoins in other wallets that had already enriched him, he became one of the holders of powerful cryptocurrencies, missing the opportunity to increase wealth, simply because he no longer remembers his passwords.
Therefore, they have to watch helplessly as other people accumulate their wealth while their own funds wait hidden behind an IronKey, a system that gives the user just ten password attempts to automatically encrypt everything inside.
Many people don’t remember passwords
According to the New York Times, lost or blocked digital wallets currently contain 18.5 million bitcoins, which could be worth around $ 140 billion.
Since the value of bitcoins has increased dramatically over the last month, Wallet Recovery Services, which attempts to help users recover lost digital keys, now receives three times as many inquiries daily.
Wallet Recovery Services reports that they now receive up to 70 inquiries a day asking for help in recovering bitcoin wealth.
“Over the past year, I’d say I spent hundreds of hours trying to open my wallets,” Brad Yasar told the Times.
The businessman says he has multiple desktop computers containing thousands of bitcoins that he created or excavated nearly a decade ago.
Unable to remember the passwords, he put the hard drives containing his bitcoins in airtight vacuum bags and hid them away from his eyes.
“I don’t want to be reminded every day that what I have now is only a fraction of what I lost,” he says.
Thomas also moved his IronKey to a secure device so he didn’t have to think about it anymore.
“I got to a point where I said to myself, ‘It’s a thing of the past because of my own mental health,'” the man admits.
Much of the initial appeal of bitcoins lay in the fact that they differed from traditional bank accounts and online wallets in that they allowed anyone to open a digital bank account and store money in it.
Consumers can create a wallet without registering with a financial institution to verify their identity.
However, it also means that there is no company that can help users recover and reset passwords.
“Even smart investors couldn’t handle private keys,” said Diogo Monica, founder of Anchorage, which helps businesses manage cryptocurrency security.
He told the Times that many users had lost their passwords.
All of this means that for Thomas, the idea of bitcoins was eventually put off, despite the man making money from wallets that he still has access to.
“The whole idea of becoming your own bank,” I’ll say, “Did you sew your own shoes?” He says.
“The reason banks exist is that we don’t want to take care of all the things that banks do.”
Since the end of last year, bitcoins have attracted more and more ordinary investors, who are increasingly convinced that it is a fixed asset rather than a speculative bubble, as some analysts and investors intimidate.
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