The wonderful thing about bitcoin is that many of its apparent benefits, such as the ability to be anonymously owned and transferred securely, are also things that usually create situations like this: the police in Germany have seized more than € 50 million ($ 60 million ) in bitcoin, but they can’t access anything because, as Reuters reports, the person they took it from will not tell your password.
The man in question was convicted and served a prison sentence for secretly installing bitcoin mining software on people’s computers, but throughout the process, he never shared a joke about how German authorities should get in. “We asked him, but he didn’t” say “is the explanation Reuters was offered by a prosecutor. It poses a big and probably obvious question: can you really confiscate something, especially money, that you can’t access or use?
The even more evident issue is the frequency with which passwords, PINs and their collective absence appear in stories about bitcoin, illegal or not. There was a recent history in The New York Times about a programmer with his own bitcoin fortune locked on a secure hard drive that revealed an incredible statistic: about 20 percent of existing bitcoins today (totaling about $ 140 billion) are either completely lost or locked in wallets with lost passwords, which means they’re completely inaccessible.
So, maybe this German bitcoin enthusiast is putting it to the people who locked him up, or maybe he just forgot his password. Reuters reports that prosecutors “ensured that man could not access [his] generosity ”, but if they also can’t access it, I think it’s safe to say that the stack of lost bitcoins has gotten a little bigger.