TIL This man has 7,002 BTC in a password-protected hard drive and lost the password to it. He has 2 tries left before the hard drive encrypts itself and the BTC is lost forever.

So, I was browsing around the web the other day and came across this story of a man named Stefan Thomas. He is a programmer who got paid 7,002 BTC in 2011 to make an animated video explaining what BTC was to the general public. Then, he stored the BTC in a digital wallet and the private keys to this digital wallet in an IronKey hard drive. The crux of the matter is that this IronKey hard drive is password-protected and he has lost the paper where he put the password on. This hard drive allows the user to have 10 guesses for the password before seizing the contents and encrypting itself, making it inaccessible to anyone forever. He has since tried to guess the password 8 times, which leaves him with only 2 tries left. At today's price, the 7,002 BTC is worth $206 million.

And he is not alone. According to Chainalysis in 2022, they have estimated that there appears to be 3.7 million BTC (about 17.6% of BTC max supply) lost or in stranded wallets. Many of these people probably either lost their hard drives or lost access to it. This is one of the realities of self-custody in crypto.

How are you guys securing your hardware wallets and have you made sure that you can access it at all times? Do you have any contingency plans in case you ever lose access to your seed phrases?

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Read more about the story here.

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