This is a potential win greater than the top prize in most lotteries in the world. The Swiss Stefan Thomas, the former CTO (Chief Technical Officer) of Ripple, could recover 7002 bitcoins, or approximately 244 million dollars. However, cryptos are on a IronKey, a USB key reputed to be tamper-proof which is notably used by military and intelligence agencies to store classified information.
The loot in the Ironkey
Unfortunately, Stefan Thomas unintentionally deleted 2 backup copies of the wallet and above all lost the piece of paper on which the password was written. In total he has 10 attempts to unlock the Ironkey and has already used 8 of them. These 7,002 BTC have been blocked there since 2011, when the former CTO of Ripple received a payment, at a time when bitcoin was struggling to reach parity with the US dollar…
This kind of story is more common than we imagine. Estimates made in 2022 suggest that in total, users would have lost access to around 20% of the Bitcoin supply. Which represents billions of dollars in cryptos. In 2021, a Reddit user claimed to have regained access to 127 BTC blocked for more than 10 years by finding the private keys on an old computer. In 2013, British man James Howells accidentally threw away a hard drive containing around 7,500 BTC. He made several attempts to locate and recover it from a dump, without success. Enough to spend a few sleepless nights.
All seemed lost for Ripple’s former CTO (who just saw the SEC drop charges against her) until the company founded in 2021 in California Unciphered claims to be able to crack the USB key. The company announces that its teams have developed a method to crack the hardware and access BTC keys stored securely for years. Wired magazine reported on October 25 that the company managed to access data stored on a similar IronKey after “200 trillion tries”. Which implies that the firm would have found a way to circumvent the restriction of 10 attempts.
Stefan Thomas refuses help from Unciphered at the moment
But, yet another twist in this incredible story, it seems that Stefan Thomas refuses help from Unciphered for the moment. What pushed the company to publish an open letter to the attention of the former CTO of Ripple“We are ready and if Stefan doesn’t want to work with us, we are still hopeful,” Michaud said. “We already have a growing business and we will be there when it is ready.” This is because Stefan Thomas would already be in contact with other experts in the field.
For the moment, Unciphered has not discussed a potential sum with Stefan Thomas. Before the letter appeared, the California-based company wondered whether Ripple’s former CTO didn’t really care about money.
Source: Cointelegraph, CryptonewsBTC
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