Researchers crack 11-year-old password, recover $3 million in bitcoin
Researchers crack 11-year-old password, recover $3 million in bitcoin
A flaw with the digital wallet and a bit of luck did the trick.
And then there's the famous case of the guy who was super early in on bitcoin and threw away the computer that had the password to the wallet, which eventually wound up being worth hundreds of millions of dollars that are now irretrievable
https://www.businessinsider.com/james-howells-threw-away-bitcoin-dump-masterplan-get-back-2022-7
I forgot about Bitcoin when it was still mostly worthless. I got rid of my old laptop when it had a ton of issues. I had around 8 btc left in a wallet after spending several hundred on um... An ancient trade route lol.
This is also what a lot of people forget how it was at the time, thinking "if only" they had been early adopters and how they'd be millionaires. I was one, and had found it was great for traveling said "trade route", but also watched when Mt Gox collapsed and tanked the price 75% while stealing millions from people, and decided to take my winnings and leave the table.
How many people would see that shit and be like "Yes, I'm going to hold onto this for the next 10 years when it's worth something" and then sit through the number of 50+% loss events that happened?
You would have done exactly what 99% of early adopters did, and considered yourself incredibly lucky that you managed to make 1000% returns and sold.
Yeah, I almost bought $20 worth of bitcoin when it was $.008 a bitcoin, which would be worth $168,000,000 today.
But realistically I would have cashed out a long time ago, so it would have been far less significant. I had some friends who bought at the same time though, one bought a car and the other got a healthy downpayment for his house.
Silk Road was way better than Wish or Alibaba. 😌
Lmao same. I had 6. That hdd is long gone
Every so often I think about that dude, sometimes ibfeel bad for him, other times in think its hilarious.
I just feel bad for him. Can you imagine how much the moment of throwing it away is burned into his mind? And ever since then he's wasted huge amounts of his life trying to find it because he's very understandably obsessed. Can you imagine accidentally throwing away 181 million dollars? And living with the knowledge that it could be out there somewhere just sitting there in the garbage?
Sounds like a nightmare.
If i were him i would try to focus on the fact that most likely he would've spent or sold the bitcoin before it became worth millions anyway, so his mistake of throwing it away probably didn't really cost him very much at all
I drove a pick axe through a drive with 1 btc I bough for shits and giggles at $20 when I was a kid. I damaged the drive pulling it out if a damn HP so I just did a low-level format. Never though it be worth anything.
Fun fact: Mining 8,000 new bitcoins takes the whole network only 9 days.
This lives rent-free in my head.
Rookie numbers...
I spent longer than i care to admit trying to figure out why there were unclickable posts in the comment section
We've all been there brother
Looks like I'm in the same boat.
Still looking for that backup of that disk with my bitcoin wallet from the early days... sadly probably gone forever.
That's why you gotta laminate your seed phrase, at the very least. And put it somewhere where it will stay for a very long time and that you'll remember (maybe hidden in a certain book, or put a false bottom in a drawer, I dunno get creative). Doesn't matter what you have or don't have on a disk, the Bitcoin isn't on the disk, it was the words you should be protecting.
I just store it in my keepass file, lol
I chuck a backup of stuff in my storage for that reason. Even if my house burns down I'll still be OK with those backups.
Good for them.
Also I'm jealous.
It is luck(?) for him the password generator isn't secure back then.
So you're telling me they stole 3 million dollars?
Well, if crypto bros are to be believed then this isn't fiat currency. If it's not fiat, then it shouldn't be enforced by state violence, meaning the courts, right? Possession is ownership when there is no remedy, so the concept of theft is meaningless. Any attempt to fix this would violate the supremacy of the blockchain.
I mean they actually noticed this was a problem and reinvented the concept of banks to entrust them with their crypto. You know, the kind of trust that crypto was supposed to make obsolete, but then the crypto bros realised how much it sucks to suck and decided they needed a bit of nannying after all.