A San Francisco man said he has “made peace” with the $250 million fortune that may have gotten away from him as a result of misplacing hisBitcoinpassword.
But those nine years have given Thomas enough time to process the potential loss. And while he says “time heals all wounds,” the moments he first realized he couldn’t access his cryptocurrency account were harrowing, to say the least.
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Bitcoin illustration.Nicolas Economou/NurPhoto via Getty
Thomas said he has used up of eight of his 10 tries to get the password right, having lost the paper he wrote it down on in 2012, and people around the world have tried to help him out.
“One person suggested, have you tried the word ‘password’?” he said. “Some people have recommendedvarious mediums, psychics, prophets that I could talk to. Some people are suggesting nootropic memory-enhancing drugs.”
Eventually, Thomas reached “a really big milestone in [his] life where” he “realized how [he] was going to define [his] self-worth going forward.”
Bitcoin logo, price and graph.Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty
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“I would just lay in bed and think about it,” he told the publication about losing the money and his attempts to log back in to his digital wallet. “Then I would go to the computer with some new strategy, and it wouldn’t work, and I would be desperate again.”
No doubt at least somewhat as a result of his experience, Thomas now believes there’s a good reason that traditional financial institutions exist, as opposed toopen-source money-exchange solutions like Bitcoin.
“This whole idea of being your own bank — let me put it this way: Do you make your own shoes?” he told theTimes. “The reason we have banks is that we don’t want to deal with all those things that banks do.”
source: people.com
