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If it was you, how would you feel?
Mr Thomas, who was born in Germany but lives in San Francisco, was given 7,002 bitcoins as payment for making a video explaining how cryptocurrency works more than a decade ago.
At the time, they were worth a few dollars each.
He stored them in an IronKey digital wallet on a hard drive.
And he wrote the password on a piece of paper he has lost.
After 10 failed attempts, the password will encrypt itself, making the wallet permanently impossible to access.
Currently, about US$140 billion worth of Bitcoin is lost or left in wallets that cannot be accessed, according to cryptocurrency-data company Chainanalysis.
The New York Times article also references an entrepreneur who lost about 800 bitcoins when a colleague reformatted a laptop containing the private keys to his wallet.
And in 2013, a Welsh man desperately searched a landfill site after throwing away a computer hard drive containing 7,500 bitcoins, this would now be valued at more than £250m (Sg $467 million) .
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55645408
Mr Thomas, who was born in Germany but lives in San Francisco, was given 7,002 bitcoins as payment for making a video explaining how cryptocurrency works more than a decade ago.
At the time, they were worth a few dollars each.
He stored them in an IronKey digital wallet on a hard drive.
And he wrote the password on a piece of paper he has lost.
After 10 failed attempts, the password will encrypt itself, making the wallet permanently impossible to access.
Currently, about US$140 billion worth of Bitcoin is lost or left in wallets that cannot be accessed, according to cryptocurrency-data company Chainanalysis.
The New York Times article also references an entrepreneur who lost about 800 bitcoins when a colleague reformatted a laptop containing the private keys to his wallet.
And in 2013, a Welsh man desperately searched a landfill site after throwing away a computer hard drive containing 7,500 bitcoins, this would now be valued at more than £250m (Sg $467 million) .
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55645408
