- People are watching Bitcoin prices rise as some struggle to recover millions from the cryptocurrency, according to The New York Times.
- Those who have lost access to their Bitcoin are given ten assumptions before the contents of their digital wallet are seized and encrypted forever.
- About 20% of the existing 18.5 million Bitcoins are in lost portfolios, worth about $ 140 billion.
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With Bitcoin prices rising by more than 50% since it hit its highest record of $ 20,000 last month, those left without access to cryptocurrency wallets are getting desperate as they calculate how much wealth they would earn if they remember their passwords.
About 20% of the existing 18.5 million Bitcoins – worth $ 140 billion – are in lost wallets, according to cryptocurrency data company Chainalysis, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.
Wallet Recovery Services, a company that helps recover lost digital keys, told the Times that it received 70 requests a day from users who are trying to access their digital wallets – three times as many as a month ago.
In an interview with the Times, Stefan Thomas, a programmer who lives in San Francisco, said his strategies for remembering his password continue to fail, leaving him with only two assumptions to discover his password before being permanently blocked. Your 7,002 Bitcoins are worth about $ 220 million this week.
The password should allow him to unlock an IronKey, a small hard drive that contains the private keys of a digital wallet that contains his Bitcoin.
Former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos, posting about the story on Tuesday, appeared to offer to help Thomas access his wallet – for 10% of its value.
—Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) January 12, 2021
Gabriel Abed is another Bitcoin owner who has lost access to his Bitcoin wallet since 2011, when his laptop was reformatted, losing 800 Bitcoin that is now worth a total of $ 25 million, according to the Times.
A persistent problem
With the rise and fall of Bitcoin’s value, hackers have been trying to access Bitcoin wallets with large amounts of Bitcoin, including a wallet containing 69,370 Bitcoin worth about $ 690 million, Vice reported in September.
Bitcoin owners accidentally lost their passwords or threw out the hard drives that stored their Bitcoins since they were introduced in 2009.
In 2017, James Howells, an IT worker who lives in the UK, lost the physical drive where he stored 7,500 Bitcoins he mined in 2009 after mistakenly throwing them into a trash can in 2013, The Telegraph reported. The city council refused to help recover the unit that was buried at a local landfill in Newport, South Wale, saying it is against the law. The Howells cryptocurrency was worth more than $ 127 million at the time.
Bitcoin owners have long tried to regain access to their digital wallets. Those attempts include using a market called All Private Keys, where people can buy, download and try to break into Bitcoin wallets that need to be broken, according to Vice.
Coinbase, an application-based cryptocurrency wallet that is planning to go public this year, generates a 12-word recovery phrase or a “seed” that can be used to access the Coinbase wallet, according to its website. Although Coinbase has added a protection feature that allows users to back up their recovery phrases to Google Drive and encrypted iCloud, it still requires users to write down and remember their “secret seed” and store it in a safe place.