Eight times out of 10 opportunities
You can’t find cryptocurrency forever without your password
“If you give 10% bitcoin, I will find it off-time”
[로이터=연합뉴스 자료사진]
(Seoul = Yonhap News) Reporter Kim Yoo-ah = 8 out of 10 possible password entry errors. Now there are only two opportunities left to find 260 billion won. This is a story of an American man who received bitcoins in the past and tried to cash them out after the recent surge in the cryptocurrency market.
According to the UK Daily Guardian on the 12th (local time), computer programmer Stefan Thomas, who works in San Francisco, California, USA, received 7,2 bitcoins in exchange for producing a video related to cryptocurrency 10 years ago.
At the time, the price of 1 bitcoin was 2-6 dollars (about 2-6,500 won), and the amount he received was about 15.3 million to 46 million won. Thomas left it in his electronic wallet and forgot it.
Then, in recent years, as the cryptocurrency market has risen, 1 bitcoin has soared to 34,000 dollars (about 3727 million won). The value of the bitcoin in his electronic wallet jumped to about $23,8068,000 (about 260 billion won).
However, Thomas forgot the password because he had not checked the electronic wallet for a long time.
[AFP=연합뉴스 자료사진]
I tried eight times with a combination of passwords I used frequently in the past, but all failed. When the number of password input errors reaches 10 times, the hard disk drive built into the electronic wallet is completely encrypted, making it impossible to find Bitcoin forever.
Thomas said, “I lie down and think about what my password was,” he said. “I came up with a new password combination and ran to the computer and tried, but the wallet did not open.”
He said, “I hate cryptocurrencies more because of this incident,” he said, saying, “Isn’t the reason we have banks because we hate doing these things?”
When his story became known, an internet security expert from Stanford Internet Observatory, a company that monitors cyber activities, made a proposal via Twitter saying, “I will find my password within 6 months, so I will give you 10% of the bitcoin I have.” did.
According to the cryptocurrency analysis company Chainalsis, it is estimated that 20% of the 18.5 million bitcoins are not being visited because the owner failed to open the electronic wallet.
In 2013, an IT industry employee accidentally throws out a hard disk drive containing 7,500 bitcoins, and it is known that they could not find bitcoins worth about 6 billion won at the time.
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2021/01/13 17:02 sent