what would you do?
A young programmer's 7,002 cryptocurrencies were locked in a digital wallet - and now he has two last two attempts to recover the secret code • "I'm desperate, just lying down and thinking about it," he said in an interview
Photo: Reuters
Two attempts to save $ 240 million:
Stefan Thomas, a German programmer living and working in San Francisco, created an animated video a decade ago explaining the cryptography process.
He received the payment for the work in 7,002 bitcoin coins, worth five dollars each.
But today each such currency is worth $ 35,000 (and do the math yourself).
As mentioned, Stefan has only two more guesses left, out of ten in total, to open the wallet where he stored the coins in 2011. "I checked all my most common passwords. I have two more guesses and I'm really desperate. I'm just lying in bed thinking About that, "Stephen told the New York Times.
The code, by the way, he wrote on a lost piece of paper.
A painful memory.
I hope others can learn from my mistakes.
Test your backups regularly to make sure they are still working.
An ounce of foresight could have prevented a decade of regret.
That said, I'll do what I always do which is focus on building things, eg @Interledger.
https://t.co/pCgObeAf4Z
- Stefan Thomas (@justmoon) January 12, 2021
Stephen Thomas, by the way is not really alone.
An encrypted wallet maintenance company recently said that many people forget their passwords and they get 70 requests for help a day to crack the code of their wallets.
Among those unlucky is businessman and entrepreneur Brad Yasser, who said he has hundreds of millions of dollars stuck in an encrypted bitcoin computer.
Thomas' desperate condition has made headlines around the world, and the network, unsurprisingly, has been criticized for trying to bail out his locked-in money.
"If you are locked in $ 220 million worth of bitcoin, you are not trying to enter a password 10 times, but taking it to professionals who will try for six months to find a loophole," a security expert wrote on Twitter.
Um, for $ 220M in locked-up Bitcoin, you do not make 10 password guesses but take it to professionals to buy 20 IronKeys and spend six months finding a side-channel or uncapping.
I'll make it happen for 10%.
Call me.
https://t.co/dTumE8Cw65
- Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) January 12, 2021