Just recently we talked about how important it is to secure your Bitcoins wallet, so the case of Stefan Thomas can even turn out to be a nightmare. This man is living it. It seems like an unreal story, an invention, but no, this is the case of a German programmer living in the United States.
The bitcoins are stored on a small encrypted hard drive, called an IronKey. It is a flash disk that offers security and privacy. And also 10 tries before formatting and deleting the content. Thomas has already tried eight times some of his most used passwords, but none have worked, and his drive has 220 million dollars in which his 7,002 Bitcoins are valued.
Stefan Thomas tells how, sometimes he lie on the bed and think of a new strategy. All in order to gain access to the more than seven thousand bitcoins that it owns, which with the current value amount to more than 200 million dollars. The very structure of Bitcoin makes sharing them easy and open. To store them safely, many users have devices like IronKey to add a layer of protection. But what was used as security has ended up being a problem for many.
According to the data revealed by the company Chainalysis, between 17% and 23% of existing bitcoins are lost in oblivion. In some cases they are wallets with few Bitcoins, but in others like Thomas’s, they represent a great fortune with the current value.
The Wallet Recovery Services company helps to find lost digital keys. According to them, they have received 70 requests a day from people who wanted to recover their passwords. Bitcoin is a decentralized system, so there is no one to call to get a new password. There are some options that in the future I can recover them physically, but they are really very slim.
Many of those who turn to companies of this type are people who acquired bitcoins a decade ago, when not everyone trusted that crypto assets would end up having the success that bitcoin has lately achieved, and who now try to reap the benefits of their investment but not they remember the keys to access it.
