Guess what an idiot with an unsustainable made up currency did THIS time...

[Sammy Sofa]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/tech ... tunes.html

Stefan Thomas, a German-born programmer living in San Francisco, has two guesses left to figure out a password that is worth, as of this week, about $220 million.

The password will let him unlock a small hard drive, known as an IronKey, which contains the private keys to a digital wallet that holds 7,002 Bitcoin. While the price of Bitcoin dropped sharply on Monday, it is still up more than 50 percent from just a month ago, when it passed its previous all-time high of around $20,000.

The problem is that Mr. Thomas years ago lost the paper where he wrote down the password for his IronKey, which gives users 10 guesses before it seizes up and encrypts its contents forever. He has since tried eight of his most commonly used password formulations — to no avail.

Of the existing 18.5 million Bitcoin, around 20 percent — currently worth around $140 billion — appear to be in lost or otherwise stranded wallets, according to the cryptocurrency data firm Chainalysis.

MORE LIKE BUTTCOIN!!!!1111!1

[muntjack]

I have 10 somewhere and it's eating me alive. I can't imagine this poor guy.

[JudasIscariotTheBird]

I have to imagine this is a rabbit hole from my Politics forum post. This makes me feel a lot better. Thanks.

[Sammy Sofa]

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/15/uk-man- ... drive.html

A British man who accidentally threw out a hard drive with a trove of bitcoin on it is once again urging local city officials to let him search for it in a landfill site.

James Howells, a 35-year-old IT engineer from Newport, Wales, said he discarded the device while clearing out his home in 2013. He claims he had two identical laptop hard drives, and that he mistakenly put the one containing the cryptographic “private key” needed to access and spend his bitcoins in the trash.

After all these years, Howells is still confident he’d be able to recover the bitcoin. Though the external part of the hard drive may be damaged and rusted, he believes the glass platter inside may still be intact.

“There is a good chance the platter inside the drive is still intact,” he told CNBC. “Data recovery experts could then rebuild the drive or read the data directly from the platter.”

Howells says he had 7,500 bitcoins which, at today’s prices, would be worth more than $280 million. He says the only way to regain access to it would be through the hard drive he threw in the trash eight years ago.

[Derwood]

Bitcoin is the dumbest thing

[seanimal]

i dunno, these cryptocurrencies... it tickles me to no end. sometimes i like to google "latest cryptocurrency" and giggle like a schoolgirl. collectively, it's somehow 15% legitimate, 65% scam, 20% burning coal fumes, and 100% farce

like etherium or bitcoin could very well have a future. and it's clear that blockchain technology is going to be the foundation of a lot of digital services in the future. but none of that matters one bit when faced with the tidal wave of ridiculous humanity that these things conjure

[nobull]

Bitcoin is the dumbest thing

People are dumb. A simple safe would have saved it.

[Bote McBoteface]

Bitcoin is the dumbest thing

People are dumb. A simple safe would have saved it.

Nah, theres really two options. You can leave the bitcoin in your account on a site like coinbase or kraken. But then youre at the mercy of their security and you risk your account being hacked and your money being stolen. The other option is what this dude did and use a “wallet” which is essentially a USB drive. You have to set very safe password for it. If you lose that password, your only hope to get back in is a list of 32 (maybe) random words assigned when you first plug the wallet in. Youre supposed to write those words down in order to use as a password backup. If you lose both the password and the list of words, you are unable to access the wallet, and nobody will be able to help you bypass it.

I dont invest in coins, i feel like bitcoin has to crash to almost nothing at some point. But this guy had two options to secure his large investment, and he chose by far the best one.

[Cubswin11]

[The_Achiever]

I love my Bitcoin.

[The Logan]

I have an old college buddy who recently invited me to a Facebook group about cryptocurrency last summer. I passed on it because I don't know squat about cryptocurrency and I wasn't really interested. Well with the GME craze and everything like that, I got invited again and I was like all right I'll take a look. Turns out my buddy is some kind of cryptocurrency guru and all the people in the group he gave them a list of coins that he researched to invest in, and a ton of people invested money into these coins and now they're sitting on six figures because apparently all the coins he researchs eventually gain. he does tedious background checks and research and all the coins, what they're about, what their goals are, it's about the figures and white papers, and determines that they're solid investments.

There's a lot more to cryptocurrency than just being an alternative currency it's what I'm realizing. A lot of it still seems like snake oil to me, but that's because I'm completely clueless on how it all works, but I think I'm far more interested in investing in cryptocurrency than the stock market at this point. Had I joined that group last summer and took it seriously and pumped a lot of the money I was earning at the time, which was a lot more than I was normally making which was weird because it was in the middle of the pandemic, I'd probably have a whole lot of money right now. a personal close friend of mine was in the group and he put $25 into one of the coins that was suggested, it's now worth $7,000.

[CubinNY]

a personal close friend of mine was in the group and he put $25 into one of the coins that was suggested, it's now worth $7,000.

And at some point in the very near future it will be worth $0.25.

[The Logan]

a personal close friend of mine was in the group and he put $25 into one of the coins that was suggested, it's now worth $7,000.

And at some point in the very near future it will be worth $0.25.

It really won't be, though, but I understand why you think that.

[Sammy Sofa]

I have no doubt that blockchain technology will play an integral part of global finances sooner rather than later, but bitcoin as we know it right now sure as horsefeathers ain't it. It's a niche toy.

[The Logan]

Yeah, nobody who is serious about this, from what I can tell, is getting in on Bitcoin because they want Bitcoin (it's too pricey to get one coin), they get in on it at fractional levels because it's a means of transferrence to other cryptocurrencies. Because it's accepted so many places, people use it to acquire other things, and some places only accept that or Etherium. I purchased some FTM and TEL coins and I could only do so by sending Bitcoin from Cashapp to a service called KuCoin. This was all incredibly confusing, frustrating, and just really horsefeathering annoying, but that's how the crypto world works right now. It seems like it's evolved a lot but it's really still in its infancy and is very much like the wild west still.

If I'm not mistaken, the big issue with BTC is the fact that it's costing valuable resources around the globe to mine it and it's so scarce it's becoming more valuable so people are pumping even more resources to get it. There are other coins out there that might be trying to become the next Bitcoin, but they are trying to do so using methods that Bitcoin couldn't implement that don't require those costly avenues to make it work.

Like I'm reading this and I have a basic understanding of what it all means but I'm still lost on 50% of it, so if you're not familiar with crypto at all it probably reads like a foreign language, but legit coins have legit plans for success. https://fantom.foundation/intro-to-fantom/

The good ones also offer interest staking to increase value and encourage long term holding. Hell, you can even invest in USDC, which is basically the US dollar's crypto coin which is literally the same as our currency, and some places are offering 7.5% interest if you hold for a month so they have funds at their disposal to back up any kind of insane trading levels. 7.5% return isn't bad for putting money away for a month if you can afford to be without it, depending on what you got sitting around.

I don't know, I just think if you do not know anything about it, now is the time to educate yourself, but it's REALLY horsefeathering confusing and isn't going to be a fun weekend project to learn and figure out. I got friends who have been into it for a few years and they're still not confident enough to call themselves well educated on crypto and blockchains

[Tim]

meh, they're all tulips.

[WrigleyField 22]

I have no doubt that blockchain technology will play an integral part of global finances sooner rather than later, but bitcoin as we know it right now sure as horsefeathers ain't it. It's a niche toy.

Yea I haven't done a ton of research on it, but from what I have read, I can't reconcile the excitement of block chain and its possibilities verse the actual value in bitcoin itself.

Plus it's either a wildly speculative "asset" to invest in or its the future of currency, but it really can't be both. The volatility and growth would be terrible as an actual storage of value as a fiat currency replacement.

[big ball chunky time]

all i need to know about the viability of this horsefeathers is that every person i personally encounter who is really into bitcoin stuff is a complete loser virgin nerd. no thanks, i have a hole in my mattress that i put my money in and at least if that ever doesnt work for me i can horsefeathers the hole.

[minnesotacubsfan]

all i need to know about the viability of this horsefeathers is that every person i personally encounter who is really into bitcoin stuff is a complete loser virgin nerd. no thanks, i have a hole in my mattress that i put my money in and at least if that ever doesnt work for me i can horsefeathers the hole.

Does your wife approve of you talking about her like that?

[seanimal]

i think bitcoin has reached a certain critical mass in order to be considered a legit thing, however flawed. at least, legit in the sense that it has real value and enough functional utility for enough people to keep it alive for awhile. as much as that reality disappoints me, i do take satisfaction that the tax evasion wet dreams of the techno-libertarian dorks won't ultimately come true. sorry nerds, going to have to obscure your weird and/or illegal porn purchases some other way

seems like the digital dollar managed by the u.s. treasury is going to be the thing we're all using eventually. it will have the credibility of the dollar but will be faster and cheaper to transact with

[WrigleyField 22]

seems like the digital dollar managed by the u.s. treasury is going to be the thing we're all using eventually. it will have the credibility of the dollar but will be faster and cheaper to transact with

Oh man please go post this take on some crypto reddit and then post the link so I can see all the replies.

[seanimal]

seems like the digital dollar managed by the u.s. treasury is going to be the thing we're all using eventually. it will have the credibility of the dollar but will be faster and cheaper to transact with

Oh man please go post this take on some crypto reddit and then post the link so I can see all the replies.

i don't want to cause anyone distress

[minnesotacubsfan]

seems like the digital dollar managed by the u.s. treasury is going to be the thing we're all using eventually. it will have the credibility of the dollar but will be faster and cheaper to transact with

Oh man please go post this take on some crypto reddit and then post the link so I can see all the replies.

i don't want to cause anyone distress

yea, horsefeathers that horsefeathers, on with yourself

https://www.reddit.com/

post updates

[seanimal]

not on my real account with its pristine posting history, and i'm far too lazy to create a burner account

[Bertz]