Lost Your Bitcoin Password? Call in the Crypto-Hunters
About $25bn worth of bitcoin is floating out there in the ether, lost or ‘probably lost’
By Hannah Murphy
Three-and-a-half years ago, Roger Ver, a bitcoin evangelist so vocal in his support for the cryptocurrency that he was nicknamed the Bitcoin Jesus, showed me how to set up my own online bitcoin wallet. He rounded off his demonstration by giving me £5 worth of the currency. One day, he said, my holdings would be worth more than £1,000.
I thought little more of it — until December last year when bitcoin’s price rocketed and investors raced to cash out. My fiver had ballooned to £400 but there was a problem: to access funds, bitcoin holders need their unique “private key”, a long alphanumeric password that serves a similar purpose to a bank-card PIN. And I had lost mine.
Because of bitcoin’s decentralised nature — the cryptocurrency is not issued or guaranteed by a bank — it is almost impossible to recover these digital keys. There is no customer hotline, no database that holds them, no way to reset them. So a misplaced scrap of paper, missing USB stick or damaged hard drive can cost bitcoin owners dearly.
According to data from the blockchain research company Chainalysis, 3.7 million…
