A very frustrated computer programmer came out to announce that he only had two guesses left to work out a password for his £ 180 million Bitcoin account.
Stefan Thomas is struggling to recall the code to access 7,002 Bitcoins on a small hard drive, known as IronKey, that were worth £ 25,637.95 each yesterday.
With an increase of 720 percent since March 2020, the price of Bitcoin has soared, but Thomas lost the piece of paper on which he wrote his password.
The device allows for ten attempts, but he has attempted eight times, and the device will be permanently encrypted and the money lost forever if he does not get it right in the next two tries.
Stefan says he got the Bitcoin as a prize for making an animation in 2011.
Stefan, who now lives in the United States in San Francisco, said: “I’d just lie in bed and think about it.”
“Then, with some new strategy, I would go to the computer and it wouldn’t work and I would be desperate again.”
Wallet Recovery Services, which helps locate lost digital keys, said that for lost passwords, it gets 70 requests a day.
Stefan, who made another fortune on Ripple, a competing currency, plans to place his IronKey in a safe facility before he or others find a way to crack it.
“He added: “It’s for the sanity of my own.