👀 This person has 7,002 #bitcoins on a password protected flash drive and has lost their password. There are only two attempts left before the flash encrypts itself and loses #Bitcoin forever.
🤔 So who is this person and what is his story?
👇 This person's name is Stefan Thomas. He is a programmer who got 7,002 #Bitcoin in 2011 for making an animated video explaining #Bitcoin to the general public. Next, he stored the #bitcoin in a digital wallet and the private keys to that digital wallet in an encrypted flash memory named IronKey.
💎 The crux of the story is that this flash memory is password protected and the person lost the paper on which the password was written. The problem is this flash drive allows the user to get 10 guesses at the password before erasing the information and encrypting itself, making it inaccessible to anyone forever. He has since tried to guess the password 8 times, leaving him with only 2 attempts.
💰 At today's price, 7,002 Bitcoins are worth approximately $200 million.
💡 And this is not the only person who loses his bitcoins. In 2022, @chainalysis estimates that there are approximately 3.7 million #BTC (about 17.6% of the total #Bitcoin supply) lost or in inaccessible wallets.
❗️ This is one of the problems of self-custodianship in digital currencies.
