Surely there's a way of reviving access to an account?
If I lost my cheque book, cheque/debit card, credit cards, statements and password for online access, the bank would still allow me access to my money. It might be a bit clunky and not as immediate as I might like, but it would happen.
Or is Bitcoin operated on the basis of total account anonymity (for some reason), even from those who ostensibly "run" it?
What would the bank do if you lost your wallet containing banknotes? That's what losing the hard disc containing your bitcoin wallet is like ...
Not without the crypto keys.
That's how blockchains are able to be publicly distributed. Every transaction on the chain is cryptographically verified back to an individual key.
As I said, within about 5 minutes of studying BitCoin over 10 years ago, one of the first few lines in my notes was: "Requires security of cryptographic keys"
I am not sure there *is* a bank, apart from the blockchain. Though some third parties do operate accounts to hold bitcoin, I don't think you have to use such an account. And from his description of events this person didn't.
The blockchain is it's own ledger and you can leave your assets on it if you like. They are quite safe*.
*There is a risk if a malevolent actor controls too many nodes that they could sign off invalid transactions. But all the blockchain implementations I have seen make that effectively impossible by randomising the nodes they use to validate a transaction.
which bit?
It is reasonably certain that the guy lost these Bitcoin numbers (they weren't worth millions when he lost them)
no, a different guy
I heard the guy who accidentally threw out the drive containing his bitcoins being interviewed on the radio about it last week.
Likewise the other guy who can't remember the decryption password to the drive which holds his bitcons*, and will wipe itself after two more attempts.
[*] ToBAGO as they say somewhere else
It'll be the cryptokeys he needs to access the blockchain and transfer the value of his account to a wallet to cash in. No keys. No cash.
Well second step is to clone the drive. That comes after the first step which is to secure a recovery key someone on a USB stick - or ideally just a piece of paper.
Can't speak for all, but LUKS lets you set up to 8 passphrases on a drive.
Trawling acronym finders that still escapes me ?
Agreed. Though I did have an interesting illustration of the sensitivity of such things to dust back in the old days. In the mid 80's I bought a drive with my own money, to upgrade my £1000 XT clone which had a 20MB drive. It was around £200 for less than 100MB when both were large numbers. I duly installed it and it rapidly failed. When I took it out, I found that when sliding it into the carrier (it was a fairly tight fit) the edge of the seal had snagged and pulled out from between the pressed "lid" and the cast body over a distance of a centimetre or so. (Seal was about a millimetre wide and half a millimetre thick, iirc).
I carefully pushed it back in, packaged it up and sent it back as faulty, with rather little hope of getting a replacement. But fortunately they did.
No exhumed hard disk, no keys.
Not bitlockered, but I think it was this
7500 Bitcoins, is the number you would dream up if sitting in an armchair in 2020, and thinking back to what might have been. When I did this fantasy calculation a couple of years ago, I "wished I'd bought 10,000 coins when I had the chance". Back when the coins were $3 each.
How did these people who lost their slip of paper, decide to buy "just the right number of coins" ?
Were they "really lucky guessers" ?
What criterion at the time, would have caused a person to buy 7500 of them ? Only now, are the optics correct for selecting that number.
As an example of a real investment, the Winklevoss twins bought around 100,000 coins at $120 each, and today they're billionaires. One reason they're billionaires on paper, is they apparently haven't cashed out. And that's the mysterious part. Did they lose their slip of paper too ? :-) And if you look at the price graph, they had to wait from 2013 until 2017, before the graph noticeably started to change.
They're 6 foot 5 inches each, and "larger than life". I think they were only 5 foot tall the day they decided to buy the coins. And now they're 6 foot 5 inches.
I rest my case.
Paul
There are two different stories on the go, at the same time.
One involves a hard drive.
I think the other one involves an Ironkey with lockout after ten password entry attempts.
Paul
He offered Bridgend Council 10% about 4 years ago to allow him to excavate the council tip and they refused then, and have also refused the offer of a lot more in recent times.
But have they used them as collateral to buy valuable real estate ?.
I think I bought £20 worth when I did. Seemed a fair amount to lose to be able to research the whole subject.
I am so pleased that I did not claim on expenses for them.
because he's basically offering them a chance to "take a gamble" on a coin toss (OK 1 in 10 odds - a dice roll)
something that the LA cannot possibly agree to do with tax-payers money
I haven't a clue what an Ironkey with lockout is
Personally I have my doubts as to whether anything you but - especially when they don't release the code - is truly safe from GCHQ.
Even if they *do* release the code, that is no guarantee its not hackable. (there are often "side channel" attacks that will work against the hardware that don't rely on flaws in the code).
Its always a case of "know your enemy". Keeping out casual snoopers, skilled security researchers, enterprise level funded cryptanalysts, and nation state level funded operatives are typically very different propositions.
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