You may have forgotten your password and after many desperate attempts may have exhausted your chances to recover it but Stefan Thomas, a German programmer based in San Francisco, cannot afford to let go of his Bitcoin fortune worth $220 million just like that.
Thomas was given 7,002 bitcoins as payment for making a video explaining how cryptocurrency works over a decade ago. At that time, bitcoins were worth a few dollars only. However, the historic surge in their value over the recent years has meant single Bitcoin worth $34,000.
Thomas had stored the bitcoins in an IronKey digital wallet on a hard drive and written the password on a piece of paper he lost. After 10 failed attempts, the password will encrypt itself and the wallet will be impossible to access. Thomas has just two attempts left.
It has been nine years since he first realized that he was locked
out of his account. “There were sort of a couple weeks where I was just desperate, I don’t have any other word to describe it. You sort of question your own self-worth. What kind of person loses something that important?” he told ABC7 News.
READ: Australia to kill racing pigeon that survived 13,000km journey from US
However, he said, “time heals all wounds,” adding that he has “made peace” with his loss.
“It was actually a really big milestone in my life where, like, I sort of realized how I was going to define my self-worth going forward. It wasn’t going to be about how much money I have in my bank account,” he said.
Thomas would not be the first potential Bitcoin millionaire to be locked out of his account. According to cryptocurrency-data company Chainanalysis, about $140 billion worth of Bitcoin is lost or left in wallets that cannot be accessed.
Leave a Comment