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.

  • BoxedFenders [any, comrade/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    It's estimated that ~20% of bitcoins are lost forever- worth around $140 billion at the current exchange rate. It's a brilliant lesson on artificially induced scarcity and its effect on market prices. I'm just blown away the more I think about it. Some anonymous programmer decided to code digital money that is inherently deflationary solely on the basis of the algorithm that it's built on- and the whole world decided these tokens have value! One of these days, we're gonna see this spill out into real world wars.

    • snackage [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      He didn't even code it. Dude just wrote a fucking white paper bad got a bunch of other people to help with the work

      • BoxedFenders [any, comrade/them]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Yeah, and that makes it even more astounding. He published a paper about a theoretical currency and got thousands of computer scientists to dedicate their lives to it. Not even Jesus could attract such devoted followers.

        • snackage [he/him]
          ·
          4 years ago

          CompSci is still in the humors phase of its development as a science or engineering discipline and I'm a software dev.