He could be a millionaire, but only with his password
2 min readThe South African man revealed that he mined 20 BTC in his youth, which means that he is now almost a millionaire. Unfortunately, he lost the key and password to his BTC wallet for him.
Password – as important as BTC itself
Mark Michaels, a 24-year-old electronic engineer from Pretoria, South Africa, was excited about cryptocurrencies as a child. More than 10 years ago, when he was in 7th grade, he learned to mine BTC.
He worked continuously for several weeks and managed to extract 20 BTC. At the time, the dollar value of the primary cryptocurrency was barely $ 0.0008. Apart from the fact that his price was insignificant, there were also no crypto platforms that would allow him to sell assets for money:
“In the end, I got tired of it, because when you mined, you couldn’t do anything else on your PC, and the BTC you mined was practically worthless.”
Since he was still young and the coins were almost worthless, he carelessly stored the key and password to his BTC wallet in a text document on his desktop. At one point, Michaels accidentally deleted files while cleaning his device. However, when the price rose to $ 1,000 a few years later, he made his first real attempt to recover the lost cryptocurrencies:
“I remember collecting all the hard drives, memory cards, CDs and DVDs at home and going through them carefully. It took about a week. I also tried to run data recovery software on my main hard drive, but it wasn’t very useful. Until then, this unit has been formatted and reused several times. “
However, Michaels said he accepted the loss of access to his assets.
The man who lost access to 7,002 BTC
The case of Mark Michaels is not an isolated example. Stefan Thomas, a German programmer living in San Francisco, can’t remember his password and lost access to 7,002 BTC.
In 2011, Thomas created an educational video called “What is BTC?” For another cryptocurrency fan who sent him 7,002 BTC for his services. However, the German did not pay much attention to it, because the virtual asset was almost worthless at that time.
When the value of BTC exploded in the following years, he completely changed his attitude and tried several times to gain access to funds. His wallet allows users ten attempts to guess the password. So far, Thomas has used eight of his most common assumptions, but without success.
