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