But it still requires a lot of organizing and logistics, and even then it's not guaranteed. It could just fail, and then the chip is destroyed and you don't get a second try.īack then, it definitely wasn't worth it. Only a few people in the world can do it. Now, the problem is that, first of all, that requires a specialized laboratory. And then with that technique, you should be able to bypass that limit of 10 tries, and then you can have a supercomputer try, you know, billions of passwords per second. There is a way to take a scanning electron microscope and take apart the physical chip and literally go into the the silicon chip and take away layer by layer, like a few atoms thick, and then read out the actual memory cells. So I sort of had to make a decision, right? Like, either I let this define the rest of my life and I keep thinking back to it and I just, you know, like you said, lose sleep for the rest of my life, or I just, you know, face the fact that this money is gone, these bitcoins are gone, and I move forward and I get back to work. And we'll get into, you know, what that last little glimmer of hope is in a moment. You know, just what you imagine you would do if you lost that sort of money.Īnd then after a couple of weeks of that, I got to a point where I started to realize that the chances of recovery were not very good. I would stay up all night trying different ideas for how to recover it, or just, like, staring at the ceiling for hours. Like, when I think back to that, it's hard to even wrap my head around how I felt that those couple of weeks.Īnd I tried everything. So what is it like for you? I mean, how many sleepless nights do you have thinking about the fact that you have $200 million that you can't get at?Īfter I realized I lost the coins, I was completely destroyed. But of course, you know, once you can't access it and the price goes up, the number just gets bigger and bigger.Ī visual representation of the cryptocurrency bitcoin (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images) In my case, it was $140,000 ($179,000 Cdn), which for me was a huge amount - like an incomprehensible amount, even then. So, you know, at the time, it might have been less money. Yeah, I think a good chunk of that, especially, like, some of the larger ones, were very early wallets. And so you can imagine it's probably hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, who are in my situation.īut I think they said it was 20 per cent of all the bitcoin accounts are owned by people who can't access them. In The New York Times article about this, they had an estimate, which was something like locked up in these wallets. How many people do you think are not able to access their fortunes? We know that this has been a very good year for bitcoin. And apparently I didn't do a very good job of that. Back then, you had to kind of come up with your own solution. Since then, a lot of people have come up with all kinds of clever solutions like, you know, metal wallets where you can put down your secret keys and things like that. And so if you hold your bitcoins, like I did, in a completely independent wallet - so not with an exchange, not with a bank, not with any kind of institution, but yourself - then it's just like cash. And so a little thing comes up when we're going to our bank or whatever, "Did you forget your password?" And then you push it and then you go through a business of changing your password. OK, this happens, right? We all know we lose our passwords. Yeah, it's a really good question, isn't it? Stefan, how is it possible that one measly little password stands between you and hundreds of millions of dollars? Here is part of his conversation with As It Happens host Carol Off. The IronKey gives users 10 password guesses before it encrypts its contents permanently, and Thomas' bitcoin is lost forever. Since then, the currency's value has skyrocketed, and Thomas' holdings are worth $220 million US ($321 million Cdn.) Later that year, he lost the password to his IronKey, the USB hard drive that contains the digital wallet that holds his bitcoins. For his efforts, a bitcoin enthusiast awarded him 7,002 bitcoins. Back in 2011, he produced an animated video explaining how the digital currency works. The San Francisco software developer and CEO was an early adopter of bitcoin. Or, he would be if only he could remember his password.
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