Blocked
With the recent rise in the price of Bitcoin, an unfortunate phenomenon is emerging: people who have accumulated large fortunes in cryptocurrency are realizing that they have long since lost the passwords of their encrypted digital wallets.
See Stefan Thomas, a programmer in San Francisco, who said The New York Times that he has 7,002 Bitcoins saved – currently worth about $ 236 million, almost a quarter of a billion dollars – but that he has no idea how to access them and can only guess two more passwords before being locked out forever.
Even leaving aside the long-term prospects for cryptography, the main message of these horror stories is that taking digital finance into your own hands is a big risk if you can’t manage your passwords.
Crypto Startups
The problem of buying or mining cryptography and then forgetting how to access it is so widespread that a whole sector of cybersecurity experts appears who can help potential wealthy people access their wealth after forgetting their passwords.
“Even sophisticated investors have been completely unable to do any kind of private key management,” said Diogo Monica, co-founder of crypto security startup Anchorage. NYT.
Great Deviation
For Thomas and others in his situation, having millions of dollars out of reach has soured the whole idea of decentralized currency like Bitcoin, according to the NYT.
“This whole idea of being your own bank – let me put it this way: ‘Do you make your own shoes?'” Thomas told the NYT. “The reason we have banks is that we don’t want to deal with all the things that banks do.”
SEE MORE INFORMATION: Lost passwords prevent millionaires from their bitcoin fortunes [The New York Times]
More about encryption: Crypto thief stole $ 54 million by guessing weak passwords