Bloke Forgets The Password To His $303 Million Bitcoin Portfolio

One bitcoin is now worth $34,000.

Unfortunately for Mr Thomas, he kept the password to accessing the digital wallet holding the Bitcoin on a piece of paper - which he lost years ago.

While Ripple is facing regulatory fallout in the US, its former chief technology officer has another problem on his mind: figuring out the password to his Bitcoin fortune. However, he lost that paper many years ago and since then made eight failed attempt to guess the password to no avail. The hard drive is password-protected, and allows users 10 attempts at entering a correct password before encrypting and seemingly cutting off possible access to the tokens.

Thomas said he was frustrated with cryptocurrency over the experience of potentially losing his bitcoin fortune.

"Then I would go to the computer with some new strategy, and it wouldn't work, and I would be desperate again".

According to the cryptocurrency data company Chainalysis, around 20 per cent of the existing 18.5 million Bitcoin appears to be stuck in lost or otherwise inaccessible digital wallets.

The programmer has only two guesses left to unlock the Ironkey that contains the private keys for his digital wallet.

At the time worth more than £4m, this would now be valued at more than £250m.

There are those, like ex-Facebook security head Alex Stamos who have offered to help Thomas unlock the hard drive, but he is asking for a 10% cut. "I'll make it happen for 10%".

For now, Thomas has put the IronKey in a secure facility (nope, he's not telling you where that is, funnily enough), just in case anyone comes up with a new way to crack the complex password.

"I got to a point where I said to myself, 'Let it be in the past, just for your own mental health, '" he told the New York Times.