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Stefan Thomas of San Francisco is a rich guy with a serious problem. His digital wallet has 7,002 Bitcoin in it. In real money terms, that's a cool $234 million.
But, he has lost the password.
The private keys that would allow Stefan to access his digital wallet are stored on an IronKey encrypted hard drive. That is the password Stefan lost.
To make matters even worse, you only get ten chances to get the password right, or the hard drive PERMANENTLY encrypts everything, and the $234 million is gone forever.
So far, Stefan has had 8 wrong guesses.
So why not ask Bitcoin to send you that "forgot my password link"? Bitcoin is decentralized. There is no way for it to do that. If you lose your password, you are on your own.
At least he is not alone in his dilemma. It is estimated around $140 billion in bitcoin has been lost to assorted owners due to lost passwords.
All of a sudden, traditional financial institutions don't seem quite so bad.
Source: New York Times
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