A German-born programmer in San Francisco has at present used up eight of x password attempts he has to unlock the hard drive containing the private keys to his Bitcoin wallet, which contains 7,002 Bitcoin (BTC). Equally of press time, those holdings would exist worth $268 one thousand thousand — that is, if simply they were accessible.

As a New York Times contour on Jan. 12 outlined, Stefan Thomas uses a hard drive called an IronKey, merely lost the paper on which he wrote downwardly the password for the device "years ago." If Thomas fails to remember it, x failed guesses will issue in the drive encrypting its contents forever. He has, then far, tried 8 guesses with no luck.

"I would but lay in bed and think about it. Then I would go to the figurer with some new strategy, and it wouldn't work, and I would be desperate again."

Nearly 20% of all existing Bitcoin — xviii.5 meg BTC — is thought to have been lost for good, in so-called "stranded" wallets, according to Chainalysis information. Thomas is not alone in his self-avowed desperation: a Los Angeles entrepreneur, Brad Yasar, told the Times that over the years "I would say I take spent hundreds of hours" trying to go dorsum into inaccessible wallets.

 Yasar has stored away his difficult drives "in vacuum-sealed bags" so that he is no longer "reminded every solar day that what I have now is a fraction of what I could accept that I lost."

Neither story is uncommon: Wallet Recovery Services, a company that specializes in recovering lost digital keys, reportedly gets lxx requests each mean solar day from clients seeking help. That number is three times higher than it was before the bull marketplace.

Thomas'south experience has patently turned him off the concept of a engineering that places the onus on individual users to have their finances into their own hands — with all the freedom, and risks, that information technology entails. Having originally received the 7,002 BTC as a souvenir in exchange for producing a video to educate people about the currency, he's now skeptical nearly leaving users with that caste of control:

"This whole idea of being your own bank — let me put information technology this fashion: Practice y'all make your own shoes? The reason we take banks is that we don't want to deal with all those things that banks practise."

Aside from his extraordinary losses, Thomas nonetheless held on to enough Bitcoin over the years to brand a fortune — he is reportedly so wealthy that he barely knows what to practise with it, to paraphrase the report. He too after joined Ripple and acquired XRP, although the visitor's recent legal difficulties may now bandage a shadow over the project'south future prospects.

The report notes that similar risks exist when users entrust third-political party custodians with their keys — citing Mt. Gox and other industry crimes — but does include input from those who believe the trade-offs of digital currency are, at the cease of the day, worth it.

An entrepreneur in Barbados, despite having lost 800 BTC in the past, claimed that "the risk of beingness my own bank comes with the reward of being able to freely access my money and exist a denizen of the earth." His view, from a corner of the globe where financial inclusion remains a business, provides an insight into why many individuals may continue to think likewise.