Saturday, January 16, 2021

Help! Anyone remember my bitcoin password?

Some stores of value are clearly overdoing the storing part


Accidents do happen, especially to bitcoin investors. An estimated 20 per cent of the digital currency is stranded — owned, for example, by people who can’t remember how to access it. I thought these guys were against the right to be forgotten?

A Financial Times colleague wisely wrote down the passphrase to his bitcoin, now worth a few thousand pounds. Sadly he wrote it down wrong. As long as he doesn’t write things down wrong in the FT, he’ll be fine. But other forgetful bitcoiners will bang their heads against their Tesla prospectuses, because the dollar value of their currency has more than tripled in the past year. A Welsh IT worker claims he binned a laptop with £230m of bitcoin, and has spent eight years asking the council for permission to search its landfill.

Financial Times 

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