Ripple CTO Can No Longer Remember The Password To His Bitcoin Wallet Worth Hundreds of Millions

Staying on top of a company preparing to go to court with the SEC and dealing with the resulting delisting of your company’s token from multiple leading crypto exchanges can be quite challenging and stressful.

However, it must be at least equally stressful to have a multi-million dollar fortune locked away with a low chance of recovery.

Only 2 Attempts Left

Originally reported on by The New York Times among other long-time HODLers in a similar situation, Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas can no longer remember the combination necessary to unlock his hardware Bitcoin wallet worth  nearly $250.6 million at the time this article was written.

Mr. Thomas owns an IronKey hardware wallet that only has 2 more password attempts left before the device encrypts for good, out of a total of 10.

According to Mr. Thomas, the idea of being your own bank comes with some drawbacks – but he still retains some hope.

This whole idea of being your own bank—let me put it this way, ‘Do you make your own shoes?’ The reason we have banks is that we don’t want to deal with all those things that banks do. […] I would just lay in bed and think about it. Then I would go to the computer with some new strategy, and it wouldn’t work, and I would be desperate again…I got to a point where I said to myself, ‘Let it be in the past, just for your own mental health.’

The 7002 bitcoins were given to him back in 2011 for making an informative video about Bitcoin – one that down the line ended up being the video that got vast swathes of people into the world of cryptocurrency.

According to Chainalysis, 2.4 million BTC are yet to be mined – but 3.7 million BTC have already been lost.

For now, Mr. Thomas has stashed the IronKey away in a secure location, in case new ways of cracking complex passwords are discovered in the future. Here’s to hoping he gets his stash back one way or another.