This man owns $321M in bitcoin — but he can't access it because he lost his password. Stefan Thomas is a bitcoin millionaire. Or, he would be if only he could remember his password.
Unfortunately, a password for a Bitcoin wallet cannot be changed. The private key remains the same. Anyone who has forgotten their password for the Bitcoin can only help themselves in this case if they can restore the seed. Saving or writing down the private key can help to find the private key if you forget it.
In July 2010, bitcoin began trading at US$0.0008, climbing to US$0.08 by the end of the month. The cryptocurrency then slowly rose into the US$10 range until it spiked to US$250 in April 2013.
How Can I Recover Lost Bitcoin? There is no way to recover bitcoin that is truly lost. Some mistaken transactions have been refunded, but only when the counterparty personally knows the sender, which is infrequent. If a private key is lost, then bitcoin belonging to that key is unspendable.
Stefan Thomas, a programmer, lost the password to access his 7,000 Bitcoins in 2012. Back then, each Bitcoin was worth $10 or $11; however, one Bitcoin is worth about $37,000, which means Thomas has more than $250 million he is unable to access.
Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao (commonly known as CZ) was the crypto billionaire who lost the most money following the crypto crisis of 2022, with a net worth drop amounting to 82 billion U.S. dollars.
However, some estimates can be made based on blockchain data and surveys of Bitcoin holders. According to data from Bitinfocharts, as of March 2023, there are approximately 827,000 addresses that hold 1 bitcoin or more, representing around 4.5% of all addresses on the Bitcoin network.
The co-founder of Tesla Inc. revealed on Twitter that he owns only a tiny fraction of one bitcoin token. "I literally own zero cryptocurrency, apart from . 25 BTC that a friend sent me many years ago," Musk confessed.
Given its steady growth rate, and accommodating all the factors that indicate the sustainability of its current growth trajectory, an investment of $1000 today will comfortably yield a return of about $11,530 by 2025.
According to historical data at Investing.com, Bitcoin's price never broke above $0.40 per bitcoin in 2010 but did manage to hit that level in early 2011. Then in February, it crossed $1.
That password, however, was written on a piece of paper and sadly lost. The 7,002 Bitcoin are now worth more than $232 million and Thomas has just two attempts left to guess the password before it's encrypted and lost forever.
US programmer has two password guesses left to access his $300m Bitcoin fortune. In a not-very-techy move, computer programmer Stefan Thomas wrote his password down on a bit of paper - then lost it.
Stefan Thomas says he long ago "made peace" with the reality he may never gain access to his $220 million bitcoin fortune. SAN FRANCISCO -- The San Francisco man who can't remember the password to unlock his $220 million Bitcoin fortune says he long ago "made peace" with the reality he may never gain access.
The "Bitcoin 1% club" refers to the top 1% of Bitcoin holders worldwide. It's hard to determine how much BTC you need to be in the 1% club, since Bitcoin isn't evenly distributed among addresses, and there are many lost Bitcoin. Estimates for the threshold range from 0.28 BTC to as high as 15 BTC.
Almost 75% of bitcoin (BTC) is in profit, according to data from Glassnode.
Roger Ver, gained control of the Bitcoin.com domain name in April 2014, where he leased it to Blockchain.info and then later to OKCoin.
Satoshi Nakamoto is the name of the individual or group credited with inventing bitcoin, the world's largest cryptocurrency.
They forfeited these $6 billion-worth assets to the national treasury. According to Young Ju, China holds $6 billion worth of cryptocurrencies — including 194,000 Bitcoin ($3.9 billion), 833,000 Ethereum ($1.2 billion), and several other unnamed digital assets — it seized from the PlusToken scam in 2019.
John Forsyth, a crypto advocate and emergency room doctor, was reported missing by relatives after not showing up to his shift at the Mercy Hospital in Cassville, Missouri, on May 21. His family launched an appeal on his whereabouts on social media soon after.
Federal agents arrested New York City couple Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein and Heather Rhiannon Morgan yesterday on charges of conspiring to launder $4.5 billion in Bitcoin stolen during the 2016 Bitfinex hack—reportedly using the proceeds to buy gold and NFT art.
Losing more money than you make
It's not that no one has made money off crypto. In fact, our survey finds that of those who've had crypto, 28% sold it for more than it was worth. But a higher rate of investors — 38% — sold their crypto for less than it was worth when they bought it. Another 13% broke even.