Stefan Thomas is about to have a very horrible no good very bad day. In the early days of Bitcoin around 2011, when they weren’t worth much of anything except to tech people, Stefan Thomas was paid in Bitcoin to make a video explaining how crypto currency works. He was paid 7,002 Bitcoin to be exact.
I don’t know what the value of Bitcoin was at the time, but its currently bouncing around in the $30,000-$40,000 range. That makes Stefan’s stash worth around $220 million dollars! Unfortunately he saved the Bitcoin on something called an IronKey, which is a password protected hard drive that gives you 10 chances to remember your password before it locks you out and encrypts your data forever, probably never to be seen again. He’s tried 8 times now. He has 2 shots left before its potentially all gone.
Now Stefan having been working with and using Bitcoin since its early days is not hurting for money. In fact he’s got more than he knows what to do with. But it still sucks to think that because of something as common as a forgotten password from 10 years ago, he could be about to lose hundreds of millions of dollars. I’m also willing to bet that for a fraction of what’s on his IronKey drive, someone out there will be able to figure out a back door in...time to brush up on my computer coding.
A painful memory. I hope others can learn from my mistakes. Test your backups regularly to make sure they are still working. An ounce of foresight could have prevented a decade of regret.
— Stefan Thomas (@justmoon) January 12, 2021
That said, I'll do what I always do which is focus on building things, e.g. @Interledger. https://t.co/pCgObeAf4Z
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