Stefan Thomas owns a large amount of bitcoins stored on a flash drive, but unfortunately he has forgotten the password needed to access them. A company has offered their services to try to regain access to the drive.
In 2011, a Swiss programmer named Stefan Thomas showed notable interest in a nascent technology that had few followers: Bitcoin. At that time, Bitcoin had a very low value, and as there was little reliable information on the subject, the company WeUseCoins entrusted him with the task of creating an outreach video. As payment for his work, he received 7,002 Bitcoins, which at the time were worth just under a dollar each.
Stefan decided to save these Bitcoins in a digital wallet and created two backup copies. However, a year later, when he thought it was a good time to use them, he ran into a problem. He had accidentally lost two of the backups and only had a third copy stored on a password-protected Ironkey flash drive. The worst of all was that I couldn't find the note where I had written down the password.
Stefan knew that he had 7,002 Bitcoins on that flash drive, the value of which had increased significantly to $140,000. However, the inability to remember the password led him to a desperate situation. He tried to guess it several times, but then realized that he only had two guesses left before the flash drive deleted the data as a safety measure. This story gained notoriety in 2021 when the New York Times published an article chronicling Stefan's growing desperation as he struggled to regain access to his Bitcoins.
In that same year, Unciphered emerged, a company specialized in decrypting encrypted devices such as Stefan Thomas' pendrive. Although it may seem like a narrow field of expertise, since not many people store valuable information on password-protected devices, it is a fact that between 17 and 23 percent of bitcoins mined to date are lost or locked by forgotten passwords. .
Unciphered ran tests on all IronKey models, including the S200 used by Thomas, and claimed to have found a way to neutralize the chip's failed attempt counter, which would allow Thomas to continue trying passwords without destroying the data. In fact, they demonstrated this technique to a Wired journalist using the same 2011 model of flash drive that contained Thomas' bitcoins.
It is true that Unciphered offered Stefan Thomas to decrypt his pendrive to recover the 7,002 bitcoins, whose current value amounts to $238,124,016. However, Thomas rejected Unciphered's offer. The reason, as Thomas confirmed to Wired, is that he has already been working with two other groups for a year to achieve the same goal, in exchange for offering them a percentage of his fortune.
However, those two groups have claimed that Thomas has not encouraged them much to begin the work either, as they are waiting for a down payment before starting the process. As an added measure, Unciphered posted a video as an open letter asking Thomas to allow them access to the pendrive and help him recover his bitcoins.
Not for everyone it is happiness
Indeed, Stefan Thomas at least keeps in his possession the pendrive containing the data that could allow him to recover his 7,002 bitcoins. However, the case of James Howells is even more unfortunate.
In 2013, he accidentally dropped a hard drive that stored data for 8,000 bitcoins, which are currently worth approximately $271 million. Since then, he has been trying to locate them at a landfill site in Newport, UK, despite resistance from authorities.
They maintain that recovering the bitcoins would involve moving around 110,000 tons of garbage, with a significant environmental impact. His case illustrates the importance of cryptocurrency security and the irrecoverable loss of digital assets in certain situations.
