$220 million worth of bitcoin locked away as man forgets password (2024)

FAQs

Who is the Bitcoin millionaire who forgot his password? ›

Discover the story of Stefan Thomas, who lost $312 million in Bitcoin due to a forgotten password.

The German-born investor was paid 7,002 Bitcoin back in 2011 and his stash is now worth £189,905,495 - however, it's locked away in an IronKey password protected hard drive which gives him just 10 attempts to correctly enter his password; Stefan has already used eight.

A recent report from The New York Times has brought startling news to the forefront: Tens of billions worth of Bitcoin are locked away, with individuals unable to access their funds due to forgotten keys.

Gabriel Abed, 34, an entrepreneur from Barbados, lost around 800 Bitcoin — now worth around $25 million — when a colleague reformatted a laptop that contained the private keys to a Bitcoin wallet in 2011.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the fallen 'Crypto-King', as he was once known, was sentenced to 25-years in prison for defrauding customers and investors of his now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX.

Secret bitcoin billionaire Jimmy Zhong lived a wild and crazy lifestyle - until he made a phone call that brought it all down. Secret bitcoin billionaire Jimmy Zhong lived a wild and crazy lifestyle - until he made a phone call that brought it all down.

NEW YORK (AP) — Crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced Thursday to 25 years in prison for a massive fraud on hundreds of thousands of customers that unraveled with the collapse of FTX, once one of the world's most popular platforms for exchanging digital currency.

In 2012, someone stole 50,000 bitcoin from the Silk Road, an illegal dark web marketplace.

He was convicted by a New York jury last year on charges including wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering, after a trial that detailed how he had taken more than $8bn (£6.3bn) from customers, and used the money to buy property, make political donations and put toward other investments.

What happens if no one sells Bitcoin? ›

If nobody is willing to sell, then there is no trade. That makes a currency worthless.

The maximum supply of 21 million bitcoins will be reached around the year 2140, after which no new bitcoins can be mined. The 21 million Bitcoin limit also has important implications for the process of Bitcoin mining.

So, who are the top holders of BTC? According to the Bitcoin research and analysis firm River Intelligence, Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator behind Bitcoin, is listed as the top BTC holder as of 2024. The company notes that Satoshi Nakamoto holds about 1.1m BTC tokens in about 22,000 different addresses.

Tens of billions worth of Bitcoin have been locked by people who forgot their key. Of the existing 18.5 million Bitcoin, around 20 percent — currently worth around $140 billion — appear to be in lost or otherwise stranded wallets, according to the cryptocurrency data firm Chainalysis.

These 1.8 million “lost” coins account for around 8.5% of the total supply of 21 million—93% of which have already been mined—that will ever exist. In most cases, it's impossible to know for sure what became of a given wallet, but it's a safe bet many are indeed gone forever.

Of course, Finman is biased: The teen crypto phenom used $1,000 his grandmother gave him when he was 12 years old to buy his first bitcoin when the little-known virtual currency was just $12 a token. By age 18, Finman had become a millionaire. (See more: Who is Erik Finman, the Bitcoin Millionaire Teenager?)

He was convicted by a New York jury last year on charges including wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering, after a trial that detailed how he had taken more than $8bn (£6.3bn) from customers, and used the money to buy property, make political donations and put toward other investments.

For the third year running, Changpeng Zhao, founder and former CEO of crypto exchange Binance, is crypto's wealthiest person.

📌📢In a remarkable turn of events, an early UK cryptocurrency investor, James Howells, has taken legal action in the British High Court in a bid to retrieve a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoins, now valued at an astonishing $538 million.