A San Francisco resident, Stefan Thomas has only two tries left to unlock his hard drive that contains 7,002 Bitcoins-that were worth £31,245 yesterday.
A programmer by profession, Stefan Thomas says that he lost the piece of paper on which he had noted the password. The particular device allows ten attempts at most and he has used up 8 of them already.
The next two tries are hence extremely crucial, and any incorrect entries will result in locking him out of the hard drive. The enormous fortune will be permanently encrypted and lost forever.
Stefan had earned the Bitcoins back in 2011 as a reward for making an animation. The price of Bitcoin around this time was less than £5 each, basically next to nothing.
But ever since the surge of Bitcoins – with a whopping growth of 720% since March 2020 alone, the move is the latest resurrection for the upstart digital currency, which is otherwise still known for its volatile nature and intense crashes.
Fraught and desolate:
“I would just lay in bed and think about it.” coveys Thomas. “Then I’d go to the computer with some new strategy and it wouldn’t work and I’d be desperate again.”
Ever since coming out about his predicament, Thomas has been receiving advice and suggestions from all around the globe. Some serious, others silly, he adds.
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“One person suggested, have you tried the word ‘password’?” he joked. “Some people have recommended various mediums, psychics, prophets that I could talk to. Some people are suggesting nootropic memory-enhancing drugs.”
So far, he hasn’t followed anyone through.
Although shocking, Stefan Thomas is not the only one who has found himself in such a pickle. Many influential and prominent individuals as well as smart investors and businessmen have fallen prey to such an unfortunate happenstance.
An LA entrepreneur, Brad Yasar says he has hundreds of millions of dollars of Bitcoin trapped in computers as he has lost the passwords.
Stefan plans to put his IronKey into a secure facility until he or others find a way of cracking it. He has personally become vary of cryptocurrencies since.
He added: “It’s for my own sanity.”
