Imagine you have $253 million in #bitcoins on a USB stick, but you can't remember the password to access it. This is the situation in which Stefan Thomas finds himself, a German programmer who received these bitcoins in 2011 for a video he made.

He only has two attempts left to enter the correct code, otherwise he will lose his precious bitcoins forever. But he hasn't said his last word. He was contacted by an American #startup , Cipher Mining, who offered to help him unlock his USB key.

How ? By using a brute force technique, which consists of trying millions of possible combinations of passwords until the right one is found. Cipher Mining claims to have already managed to recover several #crypto wallets in the past, in exchange for part of the sum.

Will Stefan Thomas accept this offer? Or will he prefer to keep hoping to find his password on his own? At the moment he doesn't seem interested in receiving help. What would your decision be if you were in his place?