Man Forgets Password to a $220 Million Bitcoin Account

Circa 2010, Stefan Thomas was given about 7,000 bitcoin in exchange for making a video on how cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin, works. Thomas was born in Germany and currently lives in San Francisco as a programmer. Thomas somehow managed to forget his password to an account that in 2021 is currently worth about $220 million.

When Thomas first received the bitcoin nearly a decade ago the value was only a couple of dollars per coin. Now one bitcoin trades at around $30,000. Thomas says that he wrote the password down on a piece of paper however he can not remember where he put it or what the password is. The password would grant Stefan access to an IronKey. An IronKey is a small drive that holds private keys to a digital wallet (Hindustan). Stefan had ten attempts to guess the password for his account, but he has already used eight of them. If Thomas fails on his last two attempts then the account will forever be impossible to access. However according to Thomas, “It was actually a really big milestone in my life where, like, I sort of realized how I was going to define my self-worth going forward. It wasn’t going to be about how much money I have in my bank account,” he said, reports UPI.com (Hindustan).