https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/05/researchers-crack-11-year-old-password-recover-3-million-in-bitcoin/
A flaw with the digital wallet and a bit of luck did the trick.
And then there's the famous case of the guy who was super early in on bitcoin and threw away the computer that had the password to the wallet, which eventually wound up being worth hundreds of millions of dollars that are now irretrievable
https://www.businessinsider.com/james-howells-threw-away-bitcoin-dump-masterplan-get-back-2022-7
I forgot about Bitcoin when it was still mostly worthless. I got rid of my old laptop when it had a ton of issues. I had around 8 btc left in a wallet after spending several hundred on um... An ancient trade route lol.
This is also what a lot of people forget how it was at the time, thinking "if only" they had been early adopters and how they'd be millionaires. I was one, and had found it was great for traveling said "trade route", but also watched when Mt Gox collapsed and tanked the price 75% while stealing millions from people, and decided to take my winnings and leave the table.
How many people would see that shit and be like "Yes, I'm going to hold onto this for the next 10 years when it's worth something" and then sit through the number of 50+% loss events that happened?
You would have done exactly what 99% of early adopters did, and considered yourself incredibly lucky that you managed to make 1000% returns and sold.
Yeah it sat in my wallet for a long time and wasn't really gaining any value. I didn't have a need for the trade route anymore cuz I just used it once for some exotic spices that I didn't really care for. Mining wasn't an option for me because I didn't have a powerful computer as a broke college kid. So I just kinda checked out.
Still sucks to think about how I could have ended up with a great return, but hindsight is 20/20 and all that.
I still have bitcoins from 2011-2014 some of which I GPU mined. I'm patient. Of course I sold some, but I still have a couple full bitcoins. Not everyone sells the whole amount in one go
I recently got my first bankruptcy payout from the BTC I had in MtGox. I made more with them stolen as I certainly would have sold them at a lower price.
Yeah, I almost bought $20 worth of bitcoin when it was $.008 a bitcoin, which would be worth $168,000,000 today.
But realistically I would have cashed out a long time ago, so it would have been far less significant. I had some friends who bought at the same time though, one bought a car and the other got a healthy downpayment for his house.
Every so often I think about that dude, sometimes ibfeel bad for him, other times in think its hilarious.
I just feel bad for him. Can you imagine how much the moment of throwing it away is burned into his mind? And ever since then he's wasted huge amounts of his life trying to find it because he's very understandably obsessed. Can you imagine accidentally throwing away 181 million dollars? And living with the knowledge that it could be out there somewhere just sitting there in the garbage?
Sounds like a nightmare.
If i were him i would try to focus on the fact that most likely he would've spent or sold the bitcoin before it became worth millions anyway, so his mistake of throwing it away probably didn't really cost him very much at all
I drove a pick axe through a drive with 1 btc I bough for shits and giggles at $20 when I was a kid. I damaged the drive pulling it out if a damn HP so I just did a low-level format. Never though it be worth anything.
I spent longer than i care to admit trying to figure out why there were unclickable posts in the comment section
Still looking for that backup of that disk with my bitcoin wallet from the early days... sadly probably gone forever.
That's why you gotta laminate your seed phrase, at the very least. And put it somewhere where it will stay for a very long time and that you'll remember (maybe hidden in a certain book, or put a false bottom in a drawer, I dunno get creative). Doesn't matter what you have or don't have on a disk, the Bitcoin isn't on the disk, it was the words you should be protecting.
When I first acquired it, I wasn't aware of a place to even check it's value. There was this old game called Dragon Tales, where you could gamble whole BTC on things like kicking a coconut tree to see if 0-4 BTC worth of coconuts would fall...
There is a guy fighting Newport council to let him dig through a landfill at the moment: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-67297013
Honestly even lamination isn’t great. Won’t survive a fire.
Best options I’ve seen are engraving your seed into metal, and/or putting multiple copies in trusted locations like family houses or safety deposit boxes.
How come everyone is forgetting the best practices in Bitcoin backup?
You put the stuff in a container, put it in a hole in your yard, and put a birdbath on top of it.
The birdbath is a crucial security step! Standard practice! Been that way for years! I frankly can't believe a lot more people don't know about it.
I chuck a backup of stuff in my storage for that reason. Even if my house burns down I'll still be OK with those backups.
The password auto generated by his software wallet used the date/time as the "random" seed for the password, so knowing the rough date he created it they were able to get it to spit out the same password again. So not very secure at all.
It all depends on the value of what you're trying to secure, and if an attacker knows the value of what's in the account, and if the attacker has access to hints about the password you used to narrow down the possibilities. The researchers knew all of that info and they still didn't want to bother trying to crack the password until they found an additional way to narrow down the possibilities even further.
There's no such thing as perfect security. A lock only needs to be strong enough to make it not worth breaking into for what's in there
Well, if crypto bros are to be believed then this isn't fiat currency. If it's not fiat, then it shouldn't be enforced by state violence, meaning the courts, right? Possession is ownership when there is no remedy, so the concept of theft is meaningless. Any attempt to fix this would violate the supremacy of the blockchain.
I mean they actually noticed this was a problem and reinvented the concept of banks to entrust them with their crypto. You know, the kind of trust that crypto was supposed to make obsolete, but then the crypto bros realised how much it sucks to suck and decided they needed a bit of nannying after all.
"Two years ago when “Michael,” an owner of cryptocurrency, contacted Joe Grand to help recover access to about $2 million worth of bitcoin he stored in encrypted format on his computer, Grand turned him down.
Michael, who is based in Europe and asked to remain anonymous, stored the cryptocurrency in a password-protected digital wallet. He generated a password using the RoboForm password manager and stored that password in a file encrypted with a tool called TrueCrypt. At some point, that file got corrupted, and Michael lost access to the 20-character password he had generated to secure his 43.6 BTC (worth a total of about 4,000 euros, or $5,300, in 2013). Michael used the RoboForm password manager to generate the password but did not store it in his manager. He worried that someone would hack his computer and obtain the password."
The password was forgotten and he asked 2 famous hackers for help, who took a fee and gave the wallet back to Michael. So, ownership is sort of loosely defined at this point. Sure, Michael probably had legal rights to it, but it held no actual value until taken by somebody else.
If I lose to key to my vault, and require a locksmith to enter… does my vault hold no value until I can enter it? Of course not, the contents is still there.
I get where you’re going, but really it makes no sense. The value (or as close to value as we are willing to put on crypto) was always there. Whether or not someone was able to get into it doesn’t change the fact that it’s there.
If a vault buried somewhere you don't remember is unearthed by experts decades later, I would argue it isn't yours.
Forgetting the password is more akin to losing the key. You dont forget where the blockchain is.
