A programmer who is a millionaire with Bitcoin but can't afford to forget his password



The virtual currency Bitcoin has greatly increased in value in the last few years. Meanwhile, it is reported that there is a programmer who wants to exchange Bitcoin worth 23 billion yen obtained in 2011, but has become inaccessible due to forgetting the USB password that stores Bitcoin. ..

Lost Passwords Lock Millionaires Out of Their Bitcoin Fortunes --The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/technology/bitcoin-passwords-wallets-fortunes.html



Programmer has two guesses left to access £ 175m bitcoin wallet | Technology | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jan/12/in-bits-the-programmer-locked-out-of-his-130m-bitcoin-account

It was reported that the price of Bitcoin soared to 40,000 dollars (about 4.1 million yen) on January 7, 2021 and doubled in less than a month. If you look at the chart below, you can see how much the price is skyrocketing.



Bitcoin, which was created in 2009, was initially

worth only 10,000 bitcoins to buy two pizzas , but since then, its value has skyrocketed as it expanded around the world. If you calculate the value of 10,000 Bitcoins at the rate as of January 13, 2021, it is equivalent to 34 billion yen.

For this reason, those who obtained Bitcoin at the beginning will get a huge amount of money, but due to the problem peculiar to the mechanism of Bitcoin, it will be in a state of 'treasure rot' where the value can not be used. Also.

Programmer Stephen Thomas, who lives in San Francisco, USA, owns $ 220 million worth of Bitcoin but forgets the password for the USB memory with data security function that stores Bitcoin. It is said that it has become untouchable. Mr. Thomas lost the paper on which the password of IronKey, a USB memory containing 7002 bitcoins , was written down a few years ago. IronKey encrypts the saved contents if you fail to enter the password 10 times, and Mr. Thomas has failed to enter the password about 8 times so far.

“I lie down in bed, think about passwords, come up with new strategies and head to the computer, but I fail and I'm desperate again,” says Thomas.



It is said that there are many people like Mr. Thomas who have forgotten the password to access the virtual currency and can not touch the huge wealth. Chainalysis , a blockchain analytics company, estimates that about 20% of existing 18.5 million Bitcoins are due to lost or inaccessible wallets. For this reason, wallet restoration services are so popular that they receive about 70 inquiries a day, Chainalysis says.

Services from traditional banks and financial companies such as PayPal allow users to provide or reset their passwords if they lose them. However, Bitcoin does not have a central bank and takes the approach of 'agreeing to follow the rules of cryptocurrencies and being managed by a network of all computers using the software'. The software algorithm then creates a private key that only the wallet creator knows.

At this time, the software allows you to 'verify that the Bitcoin network is correct without having to verify the password.' Since the managing network does not know the password, the user has to manage the password, but people often forget the password, which creates such a problem. ..

'We use banks because we don't want to do what banks do ourselves,' said Thomas, warning of the treatment of cryptocurrencies as 'becoming a bank ourselves.' ..

in Security, Posted by darkhorse_log