Facepalm: Being left with a couple of password guesses before getting locked out of a system is something many take experienced, but not with $240 1000000 on the line. That'southward the unenviable situation facing Stefan Thomas, who has lost the password to a hard drive containing 7,002 Bitcoin.

The New York Times reports that the German-born programmer, who lives in San Francisco, was given the booty of Bitcoin over a decade ago, back when they were worth just a few dollars each. Thomas stored them in a digital wallet on his IronKey difficult drive and wrote the password down on a piece of paper, which he lost. With the price of Bitcoin surging recently, that drive now has effectually $240 meg on it.

The IronKey allows for 10 incorrect passwords before its contents are permanently encrypted. Thomas already has eight failed attempts.

Bitcoin'due south price over the final three months

"I would just lay in bed and think about it," Thomas told the New York Times. "And so I would go to the computer with some new strategy, and it wouldn't work, and I would exist desperate again."

People take been offer Thomas assistance in accessing the drive—for a toll. Former Facebook head of security Alex Stamos tweeted: "Um, for $220M in locked-up Bitcoin, you don't make ten countersign guesses but have it to professionals to buy twenty IronKeys and spend six months finding a side-channel or uncapping." He added, "I'll make it happen for x%. Telephone call me," but later said this was a joke.

This isn't the first case of someone losing millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin. British IT worker James Howells mined seven,500 BTC—now worth over $250 million—keeping the private keys on a hard drive. It was accidentally thrown away in 2022.

Cryptocurrency data firm Chainalysis estimates that around 20 pct of the existing 18.v one thousand thousand Bitcoin, worth around $140 billion, is lost or stuck in inaccessible wallets.

The experience has soured Thomas' opinion of cryptocurrencies. "This whole idea of beingness your own bank – let me put it this way, do you brand your own shoes? The reason we take banks is that we don't desire to deal with all those things that banks do."