Locked
With the recent highs in the price of Bitcoin, an unfortunate phenomenon is emerging: people who amassed large fortunes in cryptocurrency realize that they have long since lost the passwords to their encrypted digital wallets.
Let’s take Stefan Thomas, a San Francisco programmer, who said that The New York Times who has 7,002 hidden Bitcoin (currently worth about $ 236 million, almost a quarter of a billion dollars), but who has no idea how to access it and can only guess two more passwords before getting stuck forever .
Even leaving aside the long-term prospects of cryptography, the key message of these horror stories is that taking digital finances into your own hands is a big risk if you can’t manage your passwords.
Start of cryptography
The problem of buying or undermining cryptography and forgetting how to access it is so widespread that there is a whole emerging industry for cybersecurity experts who can help potential rich people access their fortune after forgetting their passwords.
“Even the most sophisticated investors have been completely unable to do any private key management,” said Diogo Monica, co-founder of the cryptographic security startup Anchorage. NOW.
Major deviation
For Thomas and others in his situation, having millions of dollars out of reach has aggravated the whole idea of decentralized currency like Bitcoin, according to the NOW.
“This whole idea of being your own bank – let me put it this way,‘ Do you make your own shoes? “, Said Thomas al NOW. “The reason we have banks is that we don’t want to deal with all those things that banks do.”
READ MORE: Lost passwords block millionaires from their Bitcoin fortunes [The New York Times]
Learn more about cryptography: Crypto Thief stole $ 54 million guessing weak passwords