Representation of the virtual currency bitcoin.DADO RUVIC / Reuters
A German programmer living in San Francisco is two attempts away from accessing (or losing) a fortune of 200 million euros.
You have it as easy as entering a password.
The problem is, you don't remember it.
Avatars of the technological age.
Stephan Thomas has 7,002 Bitcoins on a hard drive and has already wrongly tried eight passwords to access its content.
If you miss the two that remain, you will have lost your money forever.
The engineer has told his story to the American newspaper
The New York Times
.
Ten years ago, he was paid 7,002 bitcoins to make an explanatory video about how the cryptocurrency works.
So each bitcoin was worth between two and six dollars.
This Wednesday, its price exceeded $ 34,000 (almost 28,000 euros).
Without much enthusiasm, the computer scientist kept the bitcoins in a digital wallet and put the keys to unlock it on an external hard drive called IronKey, a
skewer
Security USB that can be encrypted with a password and allows the user 10 unlock attempts before being encrypted forever and ever.
Thomas wrote down the hard drive password on a piece of paper and forgot about it.
Ten years later, with bitcoin turned into digital gold, he can't find the happy paper.
He has already tried eight of the most common passwords he uses, without success, and declares his despair to the New York newspaper.
"I would lie in bed thinking about it," he says, "and then I would go to the computer with some new strategy, which would not work, and I would be desperate again."
According to the
Times
, Thomas is not alone.
The nature of the cryptocurrency itself means that there are many forgotten bitcoins out there in digital wallets of which users do not remember the password and have to limit themselves to seeing how the digital currency rises (the most times) and falls (the least) of trading in his volatile career.
Suffice it to say that just a week ago it was above $ 40,600 and today it barely reaches 34,000.
An abyss, in any case, of the 5,000 that was worth just at the beginning of the pandemic that has devastated the economy in almost the entire world.
The bitcoin manager Chainalysis estimates that of the 18.5 million bitcoins mined, about 20%, which today would be worth 140,000 million dollars, may be lost or in forgotten digital wallets.
The firm Wallet Recovery Services, which is dedicated to helping customers find their passwords, tells the
Times
that it has recently received up to 70 requests for help a day from people wanting to access their digital savings.
The New York newspaper tells the story of one of them, who dedicated himself to mining bitcoins (a kind of computer treasure hunt) when the currency was created a decade ago, without great hope that it would become what it is today, and which keeps several hard drives in sealed bags after years of unsuccessful trying to access them.
Traditional banks or payment services like PayPal can supply their customers with new passwords if they have lost them, but there is no company that returns or stores bitcoin passwords.
It is the nature with which it was created by Satoshi Nakamoto, an obscure character whose idea was that anyone could create a virtual digital account anywhere in the world that no government could regulate.
The fact is that the currency, with the help of institutional investors, has become in recent months an asset safe haven, in the face of low interest rates or stock market falls, which has pushed its value to the sky.
Of course, with extreme volatility.
Thomas now denies the idea that once prompted him to accept bitcoins as payment for his services.
If in 2011 he thought that it was good that the currency could not be controlled by any government or company, now he rejects that each one can be his own bank.
“Let's put it like this: Who wants to make their own shoes?” He wonders.
"The reason there are banks is that we don't want to have to deal with the things they do," he replies.
In any case, he's not in too much of a hurry either.
He has been able to access other wallets, with passwords that he did remember, a number of bitcoins that provide him with good fortune that he does not quantify.
In addition, he joined a
startup
, Ripple,
in 2012
, which helped improve bitcoin and was handsomely rewarded.
With the rest of the bitcoins, he ensures that he has put the IronKey hard drive in a safe place waiting for a cryptographer to find a way to access it.
"I've reached a point where I've said to myself: Leave it in the past, for your own sanity."