Stefan Thomas lost the paper where he wrote down the password for his IronKey, which contains the private keys to a digital wallet that holds 7,002 bitcoins.

lmao I hope he gets desperate the next time bitcoin spikes & pays some cryptology firm to 'crack' it and they wipe it by accident.

    • CALM_ORGANIZER_BOT [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Oof, that's still like ~$5k.

      I remember the days when Mt. Gox, which held 1/3 of bitcoin data, went dark and everyone with an account got scammed/lost all their BTC. Then it turned out 95% of all BTC was owned by less than 1% of people, and that was the beginning of the end (at least for me). Seems like people have made money in the short term, but cryptocurrency still has grift energy to it.

      • 4_AOC_DMT [any]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Seems like people have made money in the short term, but cryptocurrency still has grift energy to it.

        I think this is a problem with currency in general tbh

      • BeamBrain [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        It's a Ponzi scheme. A negative-sum game (thanks to transaction fees) that can only end with a large number of losers.

      • AluminiumXmasTrees [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Jesus that's a lot more than last time I checked. It was to buy drugs on the silk road and then it got banned and I never bothered with the other markets and just left all the login and recovery data in a file deep in several other folders. I guess I'm taking a laptop apart for recovery because 5grand is a hell of a lot of money for me.

    • Sphere [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      If you still have it, pull the hard drive out and get a USB enclosure for a 2.5" (laptop-sized) hard drive. If the drive is still functional, you should still be able to access the files on it.

      • AluminiumXmasTrees [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Still got it. I might actually try that, I have all the info on there. And apparently it's worth 5 grand which is way more than I thought.

        • darkcalling [comrade/them,she/her]
          ·
          3 years ago

          If you do, immediately copy everything you want off it. Lots of hard drives that fail after sitting disused for a while do so after the second start up so try and approach it as if you have only one chance. Have a second drive with enough space ready and copy the stuff you want right away. Feel free to work on it after but just as a precaution I'd suggest that given the value involved.