San Francisco-based software developer Stefan Thomas happened to be an early adopter of bitcoin, since he was gifted 7,200 coins back in 2011 when he produced an animated video explaining how the cryptocurrency works. Unfortunately, during that same year, he lost the password to an IronKey USB drive that doubles as the cold digital wallet for his bitcoins. As of today, he has only two guesses left to gain access to the over $255-million USD worth of digital currency he has locked away. Read more for a video interview and additional information.
After a couple weeks of trying various passwords, making sure he didn’t exceed the 10 guess limit, he realized that the chances of recovery were not very good. So, with just a few guesses left, he made the hard decision to just face the fact that this money is gone, and moved forward to get back to work.
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After I realized I lost the coins, I was completely destroyed. Like, when I think back to that, it’s hard to even wrap my head around how I felt that those couple of weeks. And I tried everything. I would stay up all night trying different ideas for how to recover it, or just, like, staring at the ceiling for hours. You know, just what you imagine you would do if you lost that sort of money,” said Stefan Thomas to the CBC