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At a time when many bitcoin holders have become rich thanks to the records and fictitious gains achieved by the cryptocurrency, there is a major crisis facing this market, namely that a large number of owners of these currencies are stuck there and threaten to lose what they own because they have long lost. Their passwords or passwords evaporated from their memory and they could no longer access their electronic wallets.
Forgetting the password in the cryptocurrency market is a silent crisis or loophole that many have not noticed, at a time when Western press reports have revealed that a large percentage of owners of these currencies can no longer access it due to lost password, and some of them have already become millionaires, but with Suspension of execution, because he owns Bitcoin in millions of dollars but is unable to liquidate it or d ‘dispose of it.
It was found from a report seen by “Al Arabiya.net” that about 20% of “Bitcoin” in the world are no longer able to their owners due to the loss of their passwords and their inability to recover them, which means that around 18.5 million Bitcoin units exist on the internet, but It is not accessible and the total value of this bitcoin is around $ 140 billion.
Among the millionaires stuck in suspended Bitcoin is a German programmer who lives in San Francisco, USA, Stephan Thomas, with only two guesses to try after forgetting his password, which is now worth around $ 220 million. of dollars.
Private keys
The password will allow him to open a small hard drive, known as (IronKey), which contains the private keys of a digital wallet containing 7002 Bitcoin, and if he manages to access that wallet, he can sell what he has and monetize it and become a millionaire.
Bitcoin’s price fell sharply on Monday, but it is still over 50% higher than its level last month, when it was around $ 20,000.
The problem is, Thomas years ago lost the paper he wrote his IronKey password on, so he had the opportunity to make 10 guesses before the content was confiscated and encrypted. for ever. Since then, Thomas has tried eight of his most popular password formats, to no avail.
Thomas said, “I was lying in bed and thought about it, then I go to the computer with some new strategies, and it didn’t work, then I came back in despair.”
Cryptocurrency wealth
Reports indicate that Bitcoin has made many of its owners very wealthy in a short period of time and recorded a huge leap despite the economic problems caused by the Corona pandemic, but the unusual nature of the cryptocurrency also means that many people are deprived. of their wealth due to lost or forgotten passwords. .
Chainalysis, a company specializing in cryptocurrency and lost wallet recovery services, said it receives 70 requests per day from people seeking help to recover their fortunes, and this level is three times the requests received a month ago.
Bitcoin owners who have been banned from their wallets speak of endless days and nights of frustration as they try to access their fortunes, as many have owned cryptocurrencies since the early days of ten years ago. years, when no one believed that the tokens would have any value.
Bitcoin
This dilemma is an important reminder of the extraordinary technological foundations of Bitcoin, which distinguish it from regular money and give it some of its most dangerous qualities, because by using traditional bank accounts and online wallets, banks and other companies Financials can provide people with passwords for their accounts or reset lost passwords. As for Bitcoin, there is no company to provide or store the passwords.
Closed portfolios
The creator of the virtual currency, a mysterious figure known as “Satoshi Nakamoto”, said that the central idea of Bitcoin is to allow anyone in the world to open a digital bank account and keep money in a way that no government could prevent or regulate.
This is made possible by the Bitcoin architecture governed by a network of computers that have agreed to follow a program containing all the rules of cryptocurrency. The program includes a complex algorithm that generates an address, and the private key associated with it, that only the person who created the wallet knows.
An American newspaper, in a report seen by Al-Arabiya.net, cited numerous examples of people who owned millions of dollars in Bitcoin but were no longer able to access, control or control their wealth. dispose of it.
Among the many examples is Gabriel Abed, 34, an entrepreneur from Barbados who lost around 800 bitcoins, now worth around $ 25 million, when one of his colleagues reformatted a laptop containing the private keys of a Bitcoin wallet in 2011.
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