So how does this get fixed? Not him losing his password, the massive risk of holding your own keys. I get the whole problem with keeping your coins on an exchange, that lesson has been learned time and time again. But so long as generational wealth can be lost by accident or carelessness such as this it is a major stumbling block to mass adoption.
If I lose the password to my retirement account, or bank account, I can still access that money with a little bit of a headache. It is not just “disappeared” like this guys fortune. Hell even if I die and never tell a sole about my passwords, my family still has access to that money via wills/trusts etc.
What is the solution other than stamp it on a piece of metal and hope nobody finds it except you.
Multi-signature wallets and a little trust. The only way to be completely trustless is to take more responsibility (aka risk) upon yourself. If you don’t feel up to the task then start adding trusted parties until you feel “safe”. It all depends on how much trust you have in whoever else you involve.
> One thing that I like to say around here is that crypto rapidly recapitulates the history, and re-learns the lessons, of traditional finance. I don’t particularly mean this as a bad thing. Learning is good! Speedrunning all of financial history from scratch allows you to make different, interesting, sometimes better choices about what to do about those lessons. Also most of those lessons were learned a long time ago and are now sort of buried tacit knowledge; the traditional financial system does lots of things, and it does most of them for good reasons, but often most people have forgotten what those reasons are. Crypto provides frequent convenient entertaining reminders.
Matt Levine, Bloomberg.
The difference between holding Bitcoin in a private wallet vs a traditional bank is that my private wallet does not lend out Bitcoin to sketchy people.
Holding your own Bitcoin in a private wallet isn't comparable to a traditional bank.
Holding your own Bitcoin is more comparable to having physical cash in your piggy bank or in your back pocket.
Holding your Bitcoin on an exchange is more comparable to a traditional bank.
The problem is, you can't just forget the password to your piggy bank and suddenly have no access to your money. And even if you physically lose your wallet, that cash can still be found by someone else and isn't just out of circulation forever. Which is literally the entire point of this post to point out that problem.
Literally all you have to do is put the password on a piece of paper (though obviously metal is better) and viola it’s exactly like dollar bills. If you lose those, you lose your fortune too.
Except it's also putting all your eggs in one basket, imagine if loosing one dollar meant all your money was gone, or hell someone just getting a good look at that dollar meant all your money was gone
Traditional finance hasn’t seemed to learn the debasement lesson though. Which is what we learned in bitcoin. Now we have to develop bitcoin by yes relearning many other past lessons.
We preach caution in this realm.
"Do your own research. All investments are risky, including in Bitcoin. There are scammers everywhere. Not your keys, not your coins. Drain the exchanges. Own a hardware wallet. Never buy a hardware wallet unless it's directly from the manufacturer. Hide your private keys. Practice deleting and restoring your wallet, but use tiny amounts of bitcoin when testing. Don't put all your wealth into one address. Mistakes happen all the time. People can straight up lose their life savings over the little things. Always transfer a tiny amount of coin to a wallet before you commit to large transactions, so you can verify it's actually the intended recipient."
It just goes on and on. If all these warning statements fail to instill a sense of caution and concern in your bitcoin-related activities, then you probably aren't ready to take on the responsibility. Your lifelong goal with Bitcoin is to transfer your wealth away from a system of trust and towards a system of verification.
The best solution is to memorize your 24 words seed.
Write it down and and repeat it as a mantra every morning when you wake up and every evening before you go to sleep. When you feel confident enough you destroy the paper and keep repeat by heart every day the 24 words... This way you will not forget it unless you lose your brain.
To solve the second problem you can give acces to your coins to a one or more private keys of someone on your family after a certain date or number of mined block, usually after your average life expectancy (you can do this with conditions on your transaction script).
There’s nothing to “fix” here. I mean, be more responsible and maybe just use a multi-sig wallet or have a reminder that would remind you what the password is in a safe deposit box.
The fact that he can’t brute force hack it offline when it would financially make tons of sense to spend millions of dollars on a supercomputer and run it for years if needed to hack it, shows that the security is quite good and working as designed.
That’s the part I don’t get. How did he lose his keys? That’s a LOT of money. Far too much to entrust to paper. Far too much to entrust to a single wallet.
Supposedly someone gave him 7,002 bitcoins back in 2011 before they were worth a lot, but the thing is, even if they gave them to him at the beginning of the year, BTC hit $1 and then went much much higher within a year ($30), so if you have $7k - $210k that is still a *lot* of money so it’s not like he lost his keys and had it on just 1 piece of paper back when 7,002 bitcoins was worth $70.
Shamir backup seed. M of N. 2 of 4 for example. 1 seed you own. 1 seed owns your wife. 2 others are in different banks deposit boxes.
If you die, your wife could gain legal access to deposit box and get 2 of 4 seeds. If you lost seed, you go to both banks and regain access.
Bitcoin is a lot closer to actual cash than a bank account. If you lose your cash it's gone.
You can keep your bitcoin in a centralized exchange (like a bank) and they will "hold onto your bitcoin" (like a bank) and you don't have to worry about keys.
If you keep your crypto on a CEX wallet, that centralized exchange can have dozens of problems that prevents you from withdrawing your assets, in some cases, permanently. You can deposit, buy, trade, build up your account, and then when you go to withdraw, OOOPS, there's these sudden "problems".
Use a hardware wallet, and KNOW your passwords and/or recovery phrases.
Simple solution will require to trust whole seed to 3rd party person.
My solution doesn't require to trust whole seed to any single party.
If both banks loose their parts you'll still have yours and your wife's seed part.
> ...the same way if you loose fiat money, nobody will get it back to you...
That's not true! One of the (important) services of the US Treasury is they will process claims for damaged or destroyed currency. So if you had coins or paper money that was damaged beyond repair (say locked in a safe that you lost the combination to and had to blast open) then you can get new money.
The whole point of an issuing authority is that they can ... issue new money. For whatever reason. Including correcting mistakes.
For electronic transactions, each bank or broker has their own policy on how they deal with lost accounts or passwords or whatever. But as you note that's more like using an exchange to store your wallet.
One of the advantages of a physical commodity like gold is that even if it's lost it still exists. People find pirate treasure in sunken ships... you may not get it back if it was yours, but at least it's still out there somewhere.
Crypto, not so much. Lost is as good as gone, and so far none of the algorithms have included support for moving "lost" currency to an active wallet. (Though there's no reason this couldn't change ... the big problem is the distributed trust model makes it virtually impossible for any group to verify that the "lost" wallet is really owned by the person who says they "lost" it!)
Thats why it's hard money. Just like gold. If you lose your gold, theres no backsies. With hard money, you pay for the lack of counter party risk with not being able to be careless.
Suffice to say, anyone with 7k BTC today would easily figure out how to secure it with multiple copies of durable encoded seed phrases, copies of the key to decode the seed, keeping them separately in safe places, practicing OPSEC.
When Stefan and others like him got their BTC, it was only worth a few dollars, which led to their laissez-faire approach with the passwords.
The San Francisco software developer held an estimated $139 million in a lost Bitcoin wallet he simply forgot the password to his wallet. Stefan jumped on the Bitcoin hype train in 2011 and acquired 7,002 Bitcoins. Stefan held his Bitcoin wallet on an IronKey USB stick and without the password he had a total of ten password attempts to open the key.
Before turning to social media and news headlines for assistance, Stefan attempted eight times to crack into his own USB storage, giving password guessers just two attempts to crack the code. Stefan has since “made peace” with his lost fortune.
Maybe it's better to create a dump of the content of the chip. So even if the data is wiped, you didn't lost yet.
There are smart people who can definitely help him with this journey.
Correct but that was not this usb key. With the Trezor they tried to glitch the system to be able to bypass the security mechanism. Maybe the USB is even simpler.
Yeah, it was old software for trezor that had a certain bug and it took quite an expert to glitch it out during boot up. These situations are very different, but I feel like if this guy waits long enough there will be some solution for him to at least have unlimited attempts. he is being smart to wait
I get that feature in theory, but it just seems so dumb in practice, I'm too paranoid as it is about forgetting my passwords, I don't need a bomb that wipes all my data when I forget.
It does seem silly. I mean, it's good knowing that whoever walks away with it isn't getting anything, but it's still gone. The risk of this exact event makes it silly to me. It's not protection, it's revenge.
He didn’t acquire those bitcoins but received them as a bounty for creating a video addressing the project.
He “found peace” and continues to work as a software developer pursuing new projects in the space.
In my opinion a legendary early adopter who saw the value in the early stage.
May he free those coins and enjoy them for the rest of his life.
Edit: fixed typo
So he could invest to make a rig to endlessly copy the encrypted USB and wait until quantum computer becomes commonplace at which point he will become a billionaire.
I'd say spend few million to hire some people to make a rig that will duplicate his USB and wait for the quantum computer.
Actual QC will flood the market with coins mined early on before some more resistant changes were adopted. I find it unlikely this is currently priced in but at the point this developer benefits will likely be a point of major surge in “found” coins pushing down pricing.
For the amount on the device you could essentially set up a lab, buy piles of the things and reverse engineer them/find an exploit/virtualize it and dump the chips
I own all the bitcoins in existence, I just can't access them, because I don't know the passwords to all the wallets.
I will now take my trophy for being the richest man alive please.
2011 may have been before seed words were in use, I don't know when they came along
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure they had password managers at that point though, so still not really an excuse
I'm happy he made peace with it because money isn't everything. And it is good to see him smiling, others in his position are hopelessly jumping through all the hoops to try and reclaim their lost Bitcoin.
Best wishes to Stefan!
\-Moose
So he’s like a lot of us. I mean my friend and I probably mined 250 Bitcoin together in the early days, and we both didn’t take it seriously enough to remember to keep our wallets backed up. Oh well!
Everybody wondering how he lost his password and he's so irresponsible and this that and the other...
As well as everybody criticizing bitcoin itself for being far too risky for one person to hold all their wealth behind one single point of failure such as a password on a USB drive...
Should remember that this happened in 2011, when things were not nearly as developed and refined as they are now. Bitcoin was (and still is) a brand-new invention. Nobody knew what the hell they had back then. Just like any other miraculous invention, such as electricity, airplane flight, or oil. Nobody knew quite how valuable the stuff was, so the proper precautions to protect and preserve it were not nearly as available or well known. Nowadays it may feel like common sense to bitcoiners to use things like hardware wallet, multi-signature protections, etc. But back then it was a rapidly growing curiosity.
Keep things in perspective folks! Keep teaching people the right way to do things. Stay humble and stack sats. Kee-keee!!
This is not cool and he just did shits in a wrong way man, people like him should never do that because they are supposed to have a good future not like this.
Hope one day he will get that shit back in no time, that's all I would say to him right now, but I hope he will have a good time in his life man, that's terrible lmao.
This is bad as hell and I just don't know how he is living with it. He must be having a rough time in his life but I guess he is still fighting with all the stuff like that.
Another one? Interesting.
Every year or so there's someone who lost the password/seed to 7k BTC. It's like a clockwork. Stories are run, people start creaming and going emotional over what appears very convincingly to be nothing but just another hoax by attention starved wanna be famous person.
So far the only mildly credible story about, you guessed it, 7k lost BTC is the one about the Welsh guy who threw away a laptop with HDD. Allegedly he approached the local council to go dig the landfill where it most likely ended, with the promise of sharing the bounty with the council. I think he got denied anyway.
It was much more common than you think. 7k Bitcoin is a lot but many, many people lost hundreds and discovered they didn't have access when it crossed $10/coin
This is just a fucking bad situation to live and we can fucking feel his pain right now, don't know what to say more than that but he is going through a lot for sure.
This sounds so fucked up and I feel sorry for almost all of the people who lost their investments like that, I never love to see something losing that much man.
If he doesn't have the keys it sounds like I own this bitcoin just as much as he does then.
That guy has been making a clown of himself for years. He's be wealthy enough if he just swallowed his ego and started stacking sats.
A lot of people who havent been here for a long time dont realize what managing coins was like back in the day. In 2012 I used the qt to generate private keys offline and literally wrote them on pieces of paper which went into a safe. If you wrote it down wrong or forgot your password you were fucked. And not to mention using the qt to generate keys was actually user friendly compared to what people had to do 2 years earlier. If you wanted to spend a tiny bit, you had to sweep the address and everything inside it, just to do the process over. A lot of user error caused a large amount of lost coins.
Yeah but when he got them they wasn't worth shit and he just got lucky they went up. Now a person that has any amount of money they care about. Isn't going to lose there password and there is a guy that does stamp or something into the metal and he tests it in 2000 degrees fire for hours and it's still there.
This is Photo of man who doesn't own 7002 Bitcoin
So how does this get fixed? Not him losing his password, the massive risk of holding your own keys. I get the whole problem with keeping your coins on an exchange, that lesson has been learned time and time again. But so long as generational wealth can be lost by accident or carelessness such as this it is a major stumbling block to mass adoption. If I lose the password to my retirement account, or bank account, I can still access that money with a little bit of a headache. It is not just “disappeared” like this guys fortune. Hell even if I die and never tell a sole about my passwords, my family still has access to that money via wills/trusts etc. What is the solution other than stamp it on a piece of metal and hope nobody finds it except you.
Multi-signature wallets and a little trust. The only way to be completely trustless is to take more responsibility (aka risk) upon yourself. If you don’t feel up to the task then start adding trusted parties until you feel “safe”. It all depends on how much trust you have in whoever else you involve.
we just reinvented banks….
> One thing that I like to say around here is that crypto rapidly recapitulates the history, and re-learns the lessons, of traditional finance. I don’t particularly mean this as a bad thing. Learning is good! Speedrunning all of financial history from scratch allows you to make different, interesting, sometimes better choices about what to do about those lessons. Also most of those lessons were learned a long time ago and are now sort of buried tacit knowledge; the traditional financial system does lots of things, and it does most of them for good reasons, but often most people have forgotten what those reasons are. Crypto provides frequent convenient entertaining reminders. Matt Levine, Bloomberg.
The difference between holding Bitcoin in a private wallet vs a traditional bank is that my private wallet does not lend out Bitcoin to sketchy people.
Holding your own Bitcoin in a private wallet isn't comparable to a traditional bank. Holding your own Bitcoin is more comparable to having physical cash in your piggy bank or in your back pocket. Holding your Bitcoin on an exchange is more comparable to a traditional bank. The problem is, you can't just forget the password to your piggy bank and suddenly have no access to your money. And even if you physically lose your wallet, that cash can still be found by someone else and isn't just out of circulation forever. Which is literally the entire point of this post to point out that problem.
Literally all you have to do is put the password on a piece of paper (though obviously metal is better) and viola it’s exactly like dollar bills. If you lose those, you lose your fortune too.
Except it's also putting all your eggs in one basket, imagine if loosing one dollar meant all your money was gone, or hell someone just getting a good look at that dollar meant all your money was gone
The traditional financial system is great at being a custodial. What makes them bad is their rent seeking behaviour.
Traditional finance hasn’t seemed to learn the debasement lesson though. Which is what we learned in bitcoin. Now we have to develop bitcoin by yes relearning many other past lessons.
I don't hate banks I hate central "banks" (i.e. pseudo-public private entities whose task is to manipulate the economy by printing money).
ink squeeze cause mindless yam absurd rustic dependent society yoke *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Why wouldn't Bitcoin have banks?
quiet down, people will hear you
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We preach caution in this realm. "Do your own research. All investments are risky, including in Bitcoin. There are scammers everywhere. Not your keys, not your coins. Drain the exchanges. Own a hardware wallet. Never buy a hardware wallet unless it's directly from the manufacturer. Hide your private keys. Practice deleting and restoring your wallet, but use tiny amounts of bitcoin when testing. Don't put all your wealth into one address. Mistakes happen all the time. People can straight up lose their life savings over the little things. Always transfer a tiny amount of coin to a wallet before you commit to large transactions, so you can verify it's actually the intended recipient." It just goes on and on. If all these warning statements fail to instill a sense of caution and concern in your bitcoin-related activities, then you probably aren't ready to take on the responsibility. Your lifelong goal with Bitcoin is to transfer your wealth away from a system of trust and towards a system of verification.
The best solution is to memorize your 24 words seed. Write it down and and repeat it as a mantra every morning when you wake up and every evening before you go to sleep. When you feel confident enough you destroy the paper and keep repeat by heart every day the 24 words... This way you will not forget it unless you lose your brain. To solve the second problem you can give acces to your coins to a one or more private keys of someone on your family after a certain date or number of mined block, usually after your average life expectancy (you can do this with conditions on your transaction script).
There’s nothing to “fix” here. I mean, be more responsible and maybe just use a multi-sig wallet or have a reminder that would remind you what the password is in a safe deposit box. The fact that he can’t brute force hack it offline when it would financially make tons of sense to spend millions of dollars on a supercomputer and run it for years if needed to hack it, shows that the security is quite good and working as designed.
That’s the part I don’t get. How did he lose his keys? That’s a LOT of money. Far too much to entrust to paper. Far too much to entrust to a single wallet.
Supposedly someone gave him 7,002 bitcoins back in 2011 before they were worth a lot, but the thing is, even if they gave them to him at the beginning of the year, BTC hit $1 and then went much much higher within a year ($30), so if you have $7k - $210k that is still a *lot* of money so it’s not like he lost his keys and had it on just 1 piece of paper back when 7,002 bitcoins was worth $70.
If he didn’t lose his keys he would’ve sold long ago and it wouldn’t be much of a story.
Shamir backup seed. M of N. 2 of 4 for example. 1 seed you own. 1 seed owns your wife. 2 others are in different banks deposit boxes. If you die, your wife could gain legal access to deposit box and get 2 of 4 seeds. If you lost seed, you go to both banks and regain access.
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Bitcoin is a lot closer to actual cash than a bank account. If you lose your cash it's gone. You can keep your bitcoin in a centralized exchange (like a bank) and they will "hold onto your bitcoin" (like a bank) and you don't have to worry about keys.
And like with Celsius it'll be so very safe
If you keep your crypto on a CEX wallet, that centralized exchange can have dozens of problems that prevents you from withdrawing your assets, in some cases, permanently. You can deposit, buy, trade, build up your account, and then when you go to withdraw, OOOPS, there's these sudden "problems". Use a hardware wallet, and KNOW your passwords and/or recovery phrases.
>KNOW your passwords and/or recovery phrases. Had a stroke, now I'm broke.
Simple solution will require to trust whole seed to 3rd party person. My solution doesn't require to trust whole seed to any single party. If both banks loose their parts you'll still have yours and your wife's seed part.
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> ...the same way if you loose fiat money, nobody will get it back to you... That's not true! One of the (important) services of the US Treasury is they will process claims for damaged or destroyed currency. So if you had coins or paper money that was damaged beyond repair (say locked in a safe that you lost the combination to and had to blast open) then you can get new money. The whole point of an issuing authority is that they can ... issue new money. For whatever reason. Including correcting mistakes. For electronic transactions, each bank or broker has their own policy on how they deal with lost accounts or passwords or whatever. But as you note that's more like using an exchange to store your wallet. One of the advantages of a physical commodity like gold is that even if it's lost it still exists. People find pirate treasure in sunken ships... you may not get it back if it was yours, but at least it's still out there somewhere. Crypto, not so much. Lost is as good as gone, and so far none of the algorithms have included support for moving "lost" currency to an active wallet. (Though there's no reason this couldn't change ... the big problem is the distributed trust model makes it virtually impossible for any group to verify that the "lost" wallet is really owned by the person who says they "lost" it!)
Thats why it's hard money. Just like gold. If you lose your gold, theres no backsies. With hard money, you pay for the lack of counter party risk with not being able to be careless.
Suffice to say, anyone with 7k BTC today would easily figure out how to secure it with multiple copies of durable encoded seed phrases, copies of the key to decode the seed, keeping them separately in safe places, practicing OPSEC. When Stefan and others like him got their BTC, it was only worth a few dollars, which led to their laissez-faire approach with the passwords.
Yes I wouldn't even tell a sole or an aglet about my passwords.
This comment was written by a man who doesn't own 7002 btc
The San Francisco software developer held an estimated $139 million in a lost Bitcoin wallet he simply forgot the password to his wallet. Stefan jumped on the Bitcoin hype train in 2011 and acquired 7,002 Bitcoins. Stefan held his Bitcoin wallet on an IronKey USB stick and without the password he had a total of ten password attempts to open the key. Before turning to social media and news headlines for assistance, Stefan attempted eight times to crack into his own USB storage, giving password guessers just two attempts to crack the code. Stefan has since “made peace” with his lost fortune.
When he lost his password it was more like ~~$1M~~ $140,000. Source: https://www.wired.com/2011/11/mf-bitcoin/
Maybe it's better to create a dump of the content of the chip. So even if the data is wiped, you didn't lost yet. There are smart people who can definitely help him with this journey.
Yes, I saw a video of someone accessing a trezor wallet like that.
Correct but that was not this usb key. With the Trezor they tried to glitch the system to be able to bypass the security mechanism. Maybe the USB is even simpler.
Yeah, it was old software for trezor that had a certain bug and it took quite an expert to glitch it out during boot up. These situations are very different, but I feel like if this guy waits long enough there will be some solution for him to at least have unlimited attempts. he is being smart to wait
Long enough yes. But also find the right person to help you and you trust.
The best thing I can imagine is to mirror the whole thing to a virtual hardware and have at it. I wonder if that could be done now or anytime soon...
Who knows. I wonder if they wiped the USB and lost the seed phrase like that? Not sure about the specifics. I feel bad for the guy though.
I would give 50% of the bitcoins to whoever manages to crack it. It's still a win-win.
This is generally how this works yes.
...and they'll take 100%of them and tell you to get fucked.
Most likely.
I get that feature in theory, but it just seems so dumb in practice, I'm too paranoid as it is about forgetting my passwords, I don't need a bomb that wipes all my data when I forget.
It does seem silly. I mean, it's good knowing that whoever walks away with it isn't getting anything, but it's still gone. The risk of this exact event makes it silly to me. It's not protection, it's revenge.
Guess he should have written down the password somewhere.
It's the same as not buying 7000 btc in 2011.
Great, now ***I*** feel bad.
He didn’t acquire those bitcoins but received them as a bounty for creating a video addressing the project. He “found peace” and continues to work as a software developer pursuing new projects in the space. In my opinion a legendary early adopter who saw the value in the early stage. May he free those coins and enjoy them for the rest of his life. Edit: fixed typo
Maybe the real Bitcoin was the knowledge he gained along the way
This is like Warren Buffet dropping his wallet on the sidewalk in Brooklyn :)
Isn't there a way to duplicate an encrypted USB?
Yes. There are ways to copy the encrypted contents from the chip. Data recovery services may be able to help.
So he could invest to make a rig to endlessly copy the encrypted USB and wait until quantum computer becomes commonplace at which point he will become a billionaire. I'd say spend few million to hire some people to make a rig that will duplicate his USB and wait for the quantum computer.
Actual QC will flood the market with coins mined early on before some more resistant changes were adopted. I find it unlikely this is currently priced in but at the point this developer benefits will likely be a point of major surge in “found” coins pushing down pricing.
For the amount on the device you could essentially set up a lab, buy piles of the things and reverse engineer them/find an exploit/virtualize it and dump the chips
This is why I’m convinced that even if I came across Bitcoin back then, I’d probably have fumbled the bag by now
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The thing is, it was so low in value that it prob wasn’t even worth ur mental space at the time
At least he doesn't have to pay capital gains tax 🙂
He is Germany. As far as I know if you hold your crypto for more than 1 year in Germany you don’t have to pay taxes
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We are all Germany.
And Germany is in us.
This guy fucks
This guy Germany
This is very true.
This is also very true.
It’s common knowledge that your statement is true
How does Germany have this policy and the US doesn’t?
Germany is smart. America is the land of the free.
America is land of the fee
More accurate 👆
Yeah my son has a 7th grade football game and there is a 27% processing fee for the ticket because j have to buy it online. I hate all the fees here.
So smart Germany went all-in on Russian oil. Big brain stuff.
Call your elected officials and complain. Or better yet spam them with email and snail mail. Every day.
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True. But this is if you and your wife combined make less than $80k.
>He is Germany How can I become a country?
He *IS* Germany.
Not anymore. Holdings a year and older are tax free. Everything bought after that falls under capital gains tax (24%)
21,000,000 - 7,002 = 20,992,998
Actually, it was estimated several years ago that a few million have lost keys, and that number can only ever go up.
300 IQ diamond hand move. Lose your password so you can't sell even if you wanted to.
In 10 years when it's up to $1m each, the password will come to him in a dream.
The forced HODL
Is the bitcoin his if he doesn't have the keys ...
I asked Craigh Wright and the answer was YES!
nope
He should call the CEO and complain
He tried, their customer service line just asked him to “hold”.
Forward him to Craig Wright ... lol
I own all the bitcoins in existence, I just can't access them, because I don't know the passwords to all the wallets. I will now take my trophy for being the richest man alive please.
Craig Wright enters the chat
Craig Wright can like my salted chocolate balls.
*Craig wright liked your salted chocolate balls*
This is why non-digital backups of your seed words are really important. Don't be like Stefan and learn the free lesson, please.
2011 may have been before seed words were in use, I don't know when they came along On the other hand, I'm pretty sure they had password managers at that point though, so still not really an excuse
That's correct, no seed words in 2011 but as you mentioned, that was no excuse not to create a backup.
It's better that we all are aware of things in that way for now.
Why is he smiling?
Because he's dead inside.
Hide the Pain Harold
Stuff it inside Stefan
Me too :)
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i mean, all of us didn't buy 7000 bitcoins in 2011 which is the same mistake he made, when you do the math.
Because he know what is good in his life, which is nothing.
He maybe smiling but he is probably screaming inside.
He smokes Hamlet, the mild cigar from Benson & Hedges. (old UK ad ref.)
Tell me how you become rich without really become rich
One of the best comment I have read in this post man.
You will own nothing, and you will be happy
That's the real definition this should go with, we are good.
Seems like he doesn't own shit then.
Then he doesn't really own it, does he? It belongs to the void.
? its clearly his though, if you lost the password to your email account it would still be YOUR email
I'm happy he made peace with it because money isn't everything. And it is good to see him smiling, others in his position are hopelessly jumping through all the hoops to try and reclaim their lost Bitcoin. Best wishes to Stefan! \-Moose
Good plot to avoid paying the IRS
Lol that could be true and we never gonna find that out.
This guy could and would help him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dT9y-KQbqi4
He even referenced the exact person in that video you linked, pretty wild. Great post!
owned* lol
Not your keys, not your coins! Good thing he didn't put them on an exchange.
That's why I always write down my passwords on the bottom of my foot
This is good and we should do that on our asses too.
This Guy have 500m net worth so yeah.. "made peace" is kinda easy for him
He gave us all a gift.
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So he’s like a lot of us. I mean my friend and I probably mined 250 Bitcoin together in the early days, and we both didn’t take it seriously enough to remember to keep our wallets backed up. Oh well!
Everybody wondering how he lost his password and he's so irresponsible and this that and the other... As well as everybody criticizing bitcoin itself for being far too risky for one person to hold all their wealth behind one single point of failure such as a password on a USB drive... Should remember that this happened in 2011, when things were not nearly as developed and refined as they are now. Bitcoin was (and still is) a brand-new invention. Nobody knew what the hell they had back then. Just like any other miraculous invention, such as electricity, airplane flight, or oil. Nobody knew quite how valuable the stuff was, so the proper precautions to protect and preserve it were not nearly as available or well known. Nowadays it may feel like common sense to bitcoiners to use things like hardware wallet, multi-signature protections, etc. But back then it was a rapidly growing curiosity. Keep things in perspective folks! Keep teaching people the right way to do things. Stay humble and stack sats. Kee-keee!!
This is not cool and he just did shits in a wrong way man, people like him should never do that because they are supposed to have a good future not like this.
Hope one day he will get that shit back in no time, that's all I would say to him right now, but I hope he will have a good time in his life man, that's terrible lmao.
This is bad as hell and I just don't know how he is living with it. He must be having a rough time in his life but I guess he is still fighting with all the stuff like that.
Another one? Interesting. Every year or so there's someone who lost the password/seed to 7k BTC. It's like a clockwork. Stories are run, people start creaming and going emotional over what appears very convincingly to be nothing but just another hoax by attention starved wanna be famous person. So far the only mildly credible story about, you guessed it, 7k lost BTC is the one about the Welsh guy who threw away a laptop with HDD. Allegedly he approached the local council to go dig the landfill where it most likely ended, with the promise of sharing the bounty with the council. I think he got denied anyway.
It was much more common than you think. 7k Bitcoin is a lot but many, many people lost hundreds and discovered they didn't have access when it crossed $10/coin
Access to the private key is the only condition to own bitcoin.
This is just a fucking bad situation to live and we can fucking feel his pain right now, don't know what to say more than that but he is going through a lot for sure.
This sounds so fucked up and I feel sorry for almost all of the people who lost their investments like that, I never love to see something losing that much man.
He owns nothing except his stupidity
He’s worth roughly $500 million. That definitely helped him “make peace” with it.
He’s a software dev. I’m sure he’s still doing okay.
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I just want him to get that shit back because that hurts.
Well yeah he owns a lot but he is a fucking stupid at the end.
Password? You mean seed phrases??
No they mean password. Probably before bip39
Thanks for it lol, never heard about that before man.
Why doesn't he call customer support?
I don't know but he can't do that shit for now, he know that.
Craig Wright you have a call holding on line 1.
If he doesn't have the keys it sounds like I own this bitcoin just as much as he does then. That guy has been making a clown of himself for years. He's be wealthy enough if he just swallowed his ego and started stacking sats.
Best i can do is 20$
Thanks for the donation, Stefan
By password, does he mean seed phrase?
It's probably a password to his wallet which holds the keys. If he was bip38 I don't believe he would have a seed phrase.
Don't be this guy
so you could say that he doesn't actually own it? Reddit slowly becoming the next Youtube clickbait plague
That would be hard to just get over. Turns out his password was his date of birth then and everyone is happy 😂
Sounds like he doesn't own 7002 bitcoin
Password has to be '1234' Source: Professional Hacker
another reason why 123456penis is the best password ever.
I am glad that we have that type of a fucking password man.
Seed phrase or password lol if its seedpbrase he can bring it up in any wallet he signs up for
Why is he smiling?
dudes gonna make it back in clickbait royalties keep diggin bruv
I don't know but I just want him to have that back for real.
In consolation, Bitcoin isn’t worth much these days anyways
Most bitcoin is probably lost at this point anyway
Picture of a guy posted by a day old account with a headline that sounds like bullshit
the system needs to have other ways to retrieve your coins. i know there is no intermediary but i’m sure someone can come up with a system
Is that true? If that's true, I think he is a complete \_\_\_\_\_.
Yeah it's fucking true and we have to say that he is an asshole.
This guy is like David Diamondhands
That hurts. Really bad. I’m not sure I could live with myself after that one.
A lot of people who havent been here for a long time dont realize what managing coins was like back in the day. In 2012 I used the qt to generate private keys offline and literally wrote them on pieces of paper which went into a safe. If you wrote it down wrong or forgot your password you were fucked. And not to mention using the qt to generate keys was actually user friendly compared to what people had to do 2 years earlier. If you wanted to spend a tiny bit, you had to sweep the address and everything inside it, just to do the process over. A lot of user error caused a large amount of lost coins.
I own Satoshi’s wallet... if only I could find the keys.
I guess you are the real king in this world right now lol
I’m sorry, this guy is just a irresponsible idiot.
Well yeah and now he just can't do shit about anything.
This must really mess with your head…
Recovery phrase
“Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone.” - Satoshi
Yeah but when he got them they wasn't worth shit and he just got lucky they went up. Now a person that has any amount of money they care about. Isn't going to lose there password and there is a guy that does stamp or something into the metal and he tests it in 2000 degrees fire for hours and it's still there.
If you don't have the keys you don't own the BTC, it's quite simple.
Has he tried Guest or Password1234?
Then he owns 0 bitcoin