YOU WIN SOME, YOU LOSE SOME...
One man's cryptocurrency disaster, plus an unexpected windfall of heroin
BITTERCOIN
In 2011, San Francisco-based computer programmer Stefan Thomas was given 7,002 bitcoins as a reward for making a video explaining how the cryptocurrency works. At the time each bitcoin was worth $2-$6. Mr Thomas stored them away in his digital ‘wallet’ and forgot all about them. Currently, however, each bitcoin is now worth $56,000, so the total is worth around $395 million. Unfortunately, during the intervening decade, Mr Thomas had forgotten the password to access his IronKey hard drive (which contains his private keys to the bitcoins). He’s already entered the wrong password eight times, and if his next two guesses are also incorrect, the hard drive will be encrypted and he’ll never be able to get his hands on his $395m fortune.
“I would just lie in bed and think about it,” he told the New York Times. “Then I would go to the computer with some new strategy, and it wouldn’t work, and I would be desperate again.” He says the frustrating experience has put him off cryptocurrencies for good. “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.”
After reports of Mr Thomas’s dilemma appeared in international news sources, Internet security expert Alex Stamos based at Stanford Internet Observatory said he could crack the password within six months in return for a 10 per cent fee. With such enormous sums of money at stake, he advised Mr Thomas and anyone else in a similar plight not to try guessing a password with the risk of being locked out permanently. “Take it to professionals to buy 20 IronKeys and spend six months finding a side-channel or uncapping,” Mr Stamos said on Twitter. “I’ll make it happen for 10 per cent. Call me.”
However, a glance at Stefan Thomas’s own Twitter account suggests he has not yet been able to access his fortune. Perhaps surprisingly, he seems remarkably sanguine about the whole affair, despite numerous tweets advising him to try ‘password123’, ‘admin’ or ‘123456’ to unlock his hard drive. Other people have tweeted to him, claiming that they know his password, having seen in a vision or dream. He appears to take all these suggestions in good spirit.
In 2013, Welsh IT worker James Howells accidentally threw out a hard drive containing the keys to 7,500 bitcoins. At the time, the lost bitcoins were worth about £4 million. Now, they would be worth over £300 million. The price of Bitcoin fluctuates like any other currency, and has risen sharply by over 700 per cent since early 2020 and the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Cryptocurrency data firm Chainalysis has estimated that around 20 per cent of the extant 18.5m bitcoins in circulation (20 per cent would currently equate to around $208 billion) appears to be either lost, or is languishing in inaccessible ‘wallets’ whose passwords have been forgotten. Guardian, 12 Jan 2021.
TRUNK JUNK
Blundering police officers sold a car they had seized from drug dealers – but left $300,000 worth of heroin inside. Rick Joyner of Madison County, Alabama, bought the Ford Taurus for $500 on a government auction site. He wanted a cheap first car for his foster son, Tyrese Allen. Because he was aware it had previously belonged to drug dealers, Mr Joyner, having travelled to Nashville, Tennessee, to collect his new purchase, asked if the car had been checked with a sniffer dog. “Nah, we got it all, don’t worry about it,” came the official’s reply. “Whatever is in there, it’s yours,” he added.
It was only when Mr Joyner returned home that they discovered the Ford’s bonus feature.
“We started pulling all this stuff out of the trunk and I saw this Walmart bag and I pulled it up and it had two bundles of something that was taped really, really heavy,” he explained. “I was looking at it and I thought, ‘Something don’t look right with this’.” He called Madison County Sheriff’s Office, whose deputies arrived and informed him that the package contained two kilos of heroin. They confiscated the narcotic and thanked Mr Joyner for his honesty. Metro, 15 Jan 2021.