This man's fortune is virtual for two reasons: it is in bitcoin and above all ... he cannot access it.
Stefan Thomas, German programmer based in San Francisco, can no longer find the password of his digital bitcoin wallet which now represents, given the rise in prices, $ 220 million (180.8 million euros), relates the
New York Times
.
He only has two tries out of the ten allowed.
Beyond that, his wallet will become inaccessible forever.
He would thus join the vast “cemetery” of lost bitcoins.
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Stefan Thomas was given 7002 bitcoins in 2011 by a client.
His password must give him access to a small hard drive - or
IronKey
- which contains the digital keys giving access to the wallet containing the bitcoins.
This security system allows data to be encrypted and can only be unlocked from this password, which only the holder of the bitcoins knows.
The programmer had written it down on a piece of paper ... before misplacing it.
Stefan Thomas has already entered eight passwords commonly used by him, all incorrect.
He only has two left.
“
I just lay on my bed and think about it.
Then I was leaning over my computer with a new strategy, and it didn't work, and I was desperate again
, ”he told The
New York Times
.
“
A painful memory
”, testifies Stefan Thomas in a tweet.
All the more painful as the price of bitcoin, despite a significant drop noted on January 11, has risen enormously during the last weeks of 2020 and early 2021. The cryptocurrency is up more than 20% compared to early 2020, and despite the correction observed on Monday, it remained at $ 21,000.
Stefan Thomas is not the only one to find himself in such a situation.
Wallet Recovery Services, which helps users find their lost digital keys, has seen an increase in the number of requests.
She claims to receive 70 per day, three times more than a month earlier.
And according to the cybersecurity and cryptocurrency platform Chainalysis, about 20% of the 18.5 million existing bitcoins appear to be lost or blocked.
Which currently represents 140 billion dollars.
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This story is not unlike that of Canadian Gerald Cotten, founder and former director of the first Canadian cryptocurrency platform QuadrigaCX.
He alone had access to the private keys of the 115,000 users of the platform.
Following his untimely death at the age of 30 in 2019, millions of dollars in cryptocurrency were left inaccessible.
But if the platform then collapsed, it is because of a fraud by Gerald Cotten, demonstrated the Canadian authorities.
The latter had indeed set up a “Ponzi scheme”: the first subscribers were paid with money from new investors, until the mechanism was exhausted.
A danger of a different kind in the world of cryptocurrencies ...