No way they can decrypt that.
That’s over 210 million dollars.
That’s over 210 million dollars.
It is now over $239 million or nearly ₱13.63 billion.
Over 77 years that is over ₱484k/day or over $8.5k/day
In make-believe currency.
An ‘incident’ like this wouldn’t have happened with “real” currency.
An ‘incident’ like this wouldn’t have happened with “real” currency.
Never heard of gold coins lost in shipwrecks, banks losing track of their accounting, or inflation?
Come-on, man. Shipwrecks?!
Well, a shipwreck is far more likely to destroy a flash drive than gold. At least gold can be recovered in most scenarios. Good luck recovering data from a flash drive damaged by salt water, assuming you can find such a tiny thing on the seabed among all the debris in the first place.
As for inflation. Yes, it’s a problem. But no ‘real’ currency fluctuates nearly as much as crypto.
One day, you’re a millionaire. The next day, you’ve got squat.
Plus, the entire system relies on human greed. Each and every single crypto-bro I came across preaches about hoarding… almost as if it’s a pyramid scheme. No one ever talks about spending or using it as an “actual” currency, which is what it’s supposed to be.
Crypto is all smoke and mirrors, not much unlike NFTs, as far as I’m concerned.
You should know better.
bitcoin mostly is an asset not a currency, similar to gold. comparing assets with currencies doesn’t really make sense.
Everything is make believe currency.
A lost safety deposit box key is an old urban legend. Not sure if it’s ever happened, but it could happen with a real currency.
It’s not a currency.
I lost a similar amount in 2011 or 2012. Well not similar closer to 5000. I won’t touch crypto now.
Sold all my bitcoin back in 2013 when it went over £700. Sure I could have held on longer for a better payday, but it let me buy my home outright and still have put the rest in stocks and shares.
I get where your coming from though. It’s all potluck.
I just LOST it, as in completely accidentally. Gf smashed the hard drive accidentally (it was in a thin enclosure) and after a failed recovery and controller swap I shredded it thinking the wallet was on a different drive. Things I try not to think about much.
Jesus Christ dude
I got ragged on in highschool for obsessing over crypto, and half those people are crypto bros now.
That’s 240 billion USD. Finland’s GDP is 280 billion USD.
Makes you think.
I think I remember reading about a guy who threw out a hard drive with millions of dollars worth of bitcoin on it.
I think I have a few coins on an old drive too
Lol, I had read about the guy, but never with a picture included. He looks about how I wold expect. There was an update to the story recently where he was threatening to sue the city into bankruptcy for financial losses to him for the hypothetical amount on the hard drive. They rightly denied him the excavation because of 1) the environmental issues involved with excavating a landfill down to the depth of 10 years ago 2) rightfully doubting a 10+ year old hard drive stored with landfill effluent and trash would be recoverable 3) seemingly to me, him being a complete unreasonable prick about it (he was unwilling to even put the money up front and seemed pretty unserious in general, plus now I’ve seen him and also negatively judged him Im assuming the did too. Anyway, dude is never getting his internet money, and it seems to be completely consuming him. It’s not really funny, but sorta tragi-comic. Hopefully with a firm “no” now in hand, he can actually move on.
Edit: time flies, this story is actually the update I was talking about… now that I read it
Everyone losing early bitcoins is part of the reason they have any value at all. Scarcity is real.
Someone gave me 7 bit coins (value at the time: $0.41) as a joke before Mt. Gox was even a thing.
In an older vid ofhis, 3kliksphillip made a good point, that even if some of us had a hoard of BTC in the very early days, almost all of us would have sold before the long game came to fruition.
We would see the first baby spike and think we’ve hit the jackpot and cash out, but the one 7 years later is 20x as big…
We aren’t the expert hodlers we lead ourselves to believe.
The only reason BTC ever spiked is because it was so easy to procure them and artificially horde them to influence the value.
All the cyber criminals who hacked municipalities and held them hostage while demanding BTC as payment are sitting on the majority of known BTC which they couldn’t sell in large amounts at the time without shooting their own golden goose.
BTC never has, and never will, have value beyond what people are willing to pay for them. When you force people to pay for them to decrypt a hacked HDD containing information that actually does have value, you have to be the only dragon sitting on that gold pile so you can double-dip your ransom.
That is true.
As soon as i would have hit like 500k i would have been out asap.
This story seems off. Unciphered has shown they can crack these drives, at least to Wired allegedly, but Stefan (owner) refuses to even talk to them and see proof, because he approached two other entities a year ago? One of the hired experts even said he’s not working on it unless Stefan pays him a salary upfront to work on it, and the other being Naxos labs which has <10 employees and didnt comment. Stefan says he doesnt mind if Unciphered is subcontracted to do the work, so why doesnt the one expert just hire Unciphered, verify their claims and give them the majority of the cut, while he gets a small finders fee of 6-7 figures, as this expert wanted a salary to quote “pay his bills”, so he clearly would be happy with no work and a nice pay day, while Unciphered would walk away with millions for their work.
Like with most of crypto, I think there is more going on than what is being portrayed.
It makes me wonder if Stefan has already obtained access, and doesn’t want all of the downsides that come with the world knowing. Many a lottery winner has talked about the downsides of publicly winning loads of money, and would prefer to be anonymous if they could have. There are risks to personal security, to your friendships, and loads of anxiety. By gaining access in secret, Stefan would essentially be an anonymous lottery winner, and get to skip some of that.
Of course this is Bitcoin. If all of those coins are truly in a single wallet, then one could find it on the blockchain and monitor it for transactions. I wonder if anyone has tried finding his wallet. If the coins are broken up into multiple wallets, then never mind. But a single wallet with 7001 coins for 10+ years, that is going to stand out.
The article says a source claims he has made money from other crypto ventures, and Google’s totally not accurate results are saying his net worth is $500m, but even if that was true, why sit on a 50% increase of net wealth that is highly volatile? Also I’d imagine his contract with the two experts he contacted would have NDAs and prevent any discussion of the client, but then again the one solo expert he hired spoke openly to Wired. Finally, if you had $200 million in bitcoin, would you actually leave it there? I absolutely wouldnt.
Also if he already had access to the coins, why bother with this charade? Nobody knew his story till he made it public, he allegedly only reached out to the 2 experts last year, and spoke about it on a video podcast earlier this year, and now briefly to Wired. If he gained access why not put the story to rest with a lie that a third expert killed the device and he’s done with the stress of it all and moving on.
The whole thing is off.
why sit on a 50% increase of net wealth that is highly volatile?
We have very high inflation right now, It’s a bad time to be holding cash.
There are investments other than cash and BTC lol
Sure and the guy has them, most wealthy investors diversify.
They probably want a significant sum of the money, which is conveniently left out of the article.
I mean if it’s even true,fair deal
say…Has to be done IN my presence,get it in a legal contract
Crack it…you get 100 btc…all partys would walk away a winner
The article actually said the conversation never got that far:
The call didn’t even get as far as discussing Unciphered’s commission or fee before Thomas politely declined.
I also have an encrypted USB drive with thousands of bitcoins on.
Why does it smell more like mafiosi job than real thing?
They can’t possibly have a business model of nagging people to use their services till someone gives up and surrenders to the hacker overlords. The guy could have a billion dollars and still refuse to work with you, what’s the problem?
I imagine its a similar technique to how CC pins are extracted, Hardware stripping and reading the chips. https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/IronKey_teardown.pdf = literally top google result.