German prosecutors are holding about 1,700 bitcoin confiscated from a bitcoin miner, but the man did not give them his password to unlock the cryptocurrency.
“We asked him, but he didn’t say,” Sebastian Murer, a prosecutor, told Reuters on Friday. “Maybe he doesn’t know.”
At Saturday’s bitcoin price, the stock was worth about $ 67.9 million.
The bitcoin miner, who was from Kempten, Bavaria, was not mentioned in the report. He was sentenced to about two years in prison after installing bitcoin mining software on third-party computers, using them remotely to build a bitcoin amount, according to Reuters.
He allegedly kept his bitcoin extracted in a password-protected digital wallet, which is a common way to keep digital currency.
Without the password, there is no way to open a digital wallet.
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Last month, another man in Germany had a bitcoin stock of around $ 220 million that was inaccessible because he lost his password. In January, a man from the Welsh town of Newport said he had mistakenly thrown away about 7,500 bitcoin, worth $ 275 million.
About $ 140 billion in bitcoin, or about 20% of all bitcoin, is stuck in wallets because they forgot their passwords, according to The New York Times.
As the cryptocurrency has grown in recent months, blocked owners have seen the value go up. Bitcoin hit $ 40,000 last month for the first time, then $ 41,000, before backing down. Since then, it has risen again and, on Saturday, its 24-hour high was $ 39,982.81, according to CoinDesk.