NYT shares Bitcoin loss porn featuring Ripple’s old CTO
Imagine you’ve got millions of dollars — possibly hundreds of millions — in Bitcoin safely stowed away in your wallet, just waiting for the day when you cash out for a life of unimaginable luxury.
Now, picture losing your hardware wallet. What do you do?
The New York Times published a story this week detailing the plights of a few folks who really should’ve taken much better care of their private keys. And it’s terrifying.
Two guesses left. German programmer Stefan Thomas stored the private keys to a wallet containing 7,002 BTC he’d been paid for making an educational Bitcoin video in 2011 — at time of writing worth somewhere in the region of $220 million — on a small hard drive called an IronKey.
Time warp to 2020, and Thomas has forgotten his password and lost the piece of paper he’d written it on. Having already used up eight of the ten attempts his IronKey allows before encrypting its contents for good, Thomas is left with two guesses at $200 million.
Out of sight, out of mind. LA entrepreneur Brad Yasar mined literally thousands of Bitcoin in the crypto’s early days, storing the keys to his stash on a number of desktop computers.
However, he too mislaid and forgot the passwords that allow him to access the coins, worth hundreds of millions at today’s prices. According to Yasar, the hard drives to these machines now sit in vacuum-sealed bags and are stored out of sight because he doesn’t want to be reminded every day of what he could have had.
Never give away your laptop. Another entrepreneur, Gabriel Abed from Barbados, lost 800 BTC in 2011 when a colleague mistakenly reformatted a laptop containing the private keys to his Bitcoin wallet.
BTC was barely worth anything 10 years ago, but today that stash trades for around $25 million.
Yikes. But although these losses are huge, at least some of the investors seem to have come to terms with their situation.
- Thomas’s snafu (our first holder) told the NYT he’d held enough crypto elsewhere to make him a sizable fortune. He also worked as CTO for Ripple, which paid him in XRP.
- Abed too managed to retain many more coins than he lost, and he’s still a massive crypto advocate helping bank the unbanked in Barbados.
- But at least they aren’t Lily Allen, who turned down 200,000 BTC ($7 billion) to perform online, once, in 2009. She could’ve been the world’s richest entertainer — ahead of George Lucas, Jay Z and Oprah Winfrey.