“The plate that will fly 153 trillion won”… 3.7 million bitcoins that can’t be found without knowing the password

How would you feel if you couldn’t remember your password and couldn’t find more than hundreds of billions of dollars forever. According to statistics, there are about 3.7 million bitcoins in the world that have been lost in digital wallets due to the loss of passwords.

The New York Times quoted Chainalysis, a virtual asset market analyst on the 12th (local time), and said that 20% of the 18.5 million bitcoins currently in circulation were tied to or lost in digital wallets because they could not find the password to decrypt the lock. . It amounts to about 140 billion dollars (about 153 trillion won).

Wallet Recovery Services, a company that finds lost digital keys, recently explained that there are more than 70 requests per day. Most of them are people who own Bitcoin when it doesn’t have much value and then try to find it when the recent market price surges again.

Stephen Thomas Ripple, former Chief Technology Officer (CTO), said, “I lost a piece of paper on which I wrote down the password for IronKey, an encrypted hard drive that keeps keys in a digital wallet many years ago.” I tried 8 times, but it didn’t work out.”

He added, “The wallet contains 7002 pieces of bitcoins worth 220 million dollars (about 240 billion won), but if the remaining two attempts fail, you will not be able to find bitcoins forever.”

Thomas leaves IronKey in a secure facility hoping that cryptographers will be able to open his digital wallet. Earlier, Thomas argued that there was a problem with Bitcoin’s payment protocol.

Brad Yashard, a businessman in Los Angeles, also said he had a desktop with thousands of bitcoins mined in the early days, but lost his hard drive with passwords years ago.

“I don’t remember anything other than putting it in a vacuum bag. I spent hundreds of hours looking for it for years,” said Yashad. “If I had it, it would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Gabriel Abed, from Barbados, explained that 10 years ago, when a colleague reformatted a laptop containing a personal key, he lost 800 bitcoins, now worth about $25 million.

Unfortunately, it seems that Bitcoin cannot solve the problem. Bitcoin doesn’t store passwords. Individuals who purchase bitcoins are given a private key that only the person can access to a digital wallet, so it is impossible to find it without knowing the password.

Meanwhile, the recent bitcoin price is riding a roller coaster. It rose to 46 million won on the 8th and dropped to 33 million won on the 11th, after three days. Since then, it has started rebounding again and is trading at 39 million won as of the 12th.

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