- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
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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 it sat in my wallet for a long time and wasn’t really gaining any value. I didn’t have a need for the trade route anymore cuz I just used it once for some exotic spices that I didn’t really care for. Mining wasn’t an option for me because I didn’t have a powerful computer as a broke college kid. So I just kinda checked out.
Still sucks to think about how I could have ended up with a great return, but hindsight is 20/20 and all that.
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.
Rookie numbers…
I spent longer than i care to admit trying to figure out why there were unclickable posts in the comment section
Looks like I’m in the same boat.
It is luck(?) for him the password generator isn’t secure back then.
The password auto generated by his software wallet used the date/time as the “random” seed for the password, so knowing the rough date he created it they were able to get it to spit out the same password again. So not very secure at all.
“researchers” I’m pretty sure this is a heist team
Or Archaeologists.
You can’t steal what nobody owns.
Isn’t this explicitly someone’s?
"Two years ago when “Michael,” an owner of cryptocurrency, contacted Joe Grand to help recover access to about $2 million worth of bitcoin he stored in encrypted format on his computer, Grand turned him down.
Michael, who is based in Europe and asked to remain anonymous, stored the cryptocurrency in a password-protected digital wallet. He generated a password using the RoboForm password manager and stored that password in a file encrypted with a tool called TrueCrypt. At some point, that file got corrupted, and Michael lost access to the 20-character password he had generated to secure his 43.6 BTC (worth a total of about 4,000 euros, or $5,300, in 2013). Michael used the RoboForm password manager to generate the password but did not store it in his manager. He worried that someone would hack his computer and obtain the password."
The password was forgotten and he asked 2 famous hackers for help, who took a fee and gave the wallet back to Michael. So, ownership is sort of loosely defined at this point. Sure, Michael probably had legal rights to it, but it held no actual value until taken by somebody else.
If I lose to key to my vault, and require a locksmith to enter… does my vault hold no value until I can enter it? Of course not, the contents is still there.
I get where you’re going, but really it makes no sense. The value (or as close to value as we are willing to put on crypto) was always there. Whether or not someone was able to get into it doesn’t change the fact that it’s there.
If a vault buried somewhere you don’t remember is unearthed by experts decades later, I would argue it isn’t yours.
Forgetting the password is more akin to losing the key. You dont forget where the blockchain is.
