There are fortunes to be made by investing in bitcoin – but some investors are finding that these fortunes can be quickly lost if they forget their passwords.
News recently broke about an investor who was two password tries away from being permanenly locked out of his bitcoin wallet, and the 7 002 bitcoins secured in it.
These bitcoins are worth about $236-million, but Stefan Thomas tells the New York Times that he is in imminent danger of losing them forever if he doesn’t come up with the correct password in the next two attempts.
Thomas is not alone: it seems that enough people are in the same predicament that a small industry has sprung up to help people recover their passwords.
There is still no guarantee, however: one wallet recovery service says it will only take a fee if it is successful in unlocking the users’ wallet. That fee ranges from 15% to 20% of the recovered amount, though, so there’s plenty of incentive to get it right.