Is the ninth a charm? For Stefan Thomas, this is the $ 220 million question.
The San Francisco developer, according to the New York Times, owns 7,002 bitcoin BTCUSD,
in a digital wallet he can’t access because, well, he’s lost his password. He tried to guess eight times to no avail. Now he has only two more chances or his luck will disappear.
The hard drive where his bitcoin is, known as IronKey, allows users 10 attempts to crack the code before encrypting its contents forever. Of course, it was a stressful time for Thomas, who years ago lost his piece of password paper.
“I would go to bed and think about it,” he said in an interview with the Times. “Then I would go to the computer with a new strategy and it wouldn’t work and I would be desperate again.”
Thomas is not the only one with a password away from the wealth of bitcoin. According to Chainalysis, about 20% of the existing 18.5 million bitcoins, valued at $ 140 billion, appear to be lost in digital wallets.
Like many bitcoin enthusiasts, Thomas was attracted to the cryptocurrency in part because it was not controlled by a country or a traditional bank. Now he has some secondary thoughts. “This whole idea of being my own bank – let me say, ‘Do you make your own shoes?’ ” he said. “The reason we have banks is that we don’t want to deal with all those things that banks do.”
But don’t feel too bad for Thomas. He owned enough bitcoin to “give him more wealth than he knows what to do with,” the Times reported. He also cashed in Ripple XRPUSD,
a cryptocurrency start-up he joined in 2012.
At the last check on Tuesday, Bitcoin traded over $ 34,000 and has now risen about 320% in the last year, while the S&P 500 SPX,
gained 17%.