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People Who Can't Remember Their Bitcoin Passwords Are Really Freaking Out Now (slate.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Slate: Bitcoin has had quite a week. On Thursday, the cryptocurrency surged past $19,000 a coin before dropping down to $15,600 by Friday midday. The price of a single Bitcoin was below $1,000 in January. Any investors who bought Bitcoins back in 2013, when the price was less than $100, probably feel pretty smart right now. But not all early cryptocurrency enthusiasts are counting their coins. Instead they might be racking their brains trying to remember their passwords, without which those few Bitcoins they bought as an experiment a few years ago could be locked away forever. That's because Bitcoin's decentralization relies on cryptography, where each transaction is signed with an identifier assigned to the person paying and the person receiving Bitcoin.
"I've tried to ignore the news about Bitcoin completely," joked Alexander Halavais, a professor of social technology at Arizona State University, who said he bought $70 of Bitcoin about seven years as a demonstration for a graduate class he was teaching at the time but has since forgotten his password. "I really don't want to know what it's worth now," he told me. "This is possibly $400K and I'm freaking the fuck out. I'm a college student so this would change my life lmao," wrote one Reddit user last week. The user claimed to have bought 40 bitcoins in 2013 but can't remember the password now. "A few years ago, I bought about 20 euros worth of bitcoin, while it was at around 300eur/btc.," lamented another Reddit user earlier this week. "Haven't looked at it since, and recently someone mentioned the price had hit 10.000usd. So, I decided to take a look at my wallet, but found that it wasn't my usual password. I have tried every combination of the password variations I usually use, but none of them worked."
"I've tried to ignore the news about Bitcoin completely," joked Alexander Halavais, a professor of social technology at Arizona State University, who said he bought $70 of Bitcoin about seven years as a demonstration for a graduate class he was teaching at the time but has since forgotten his password. "I really don't want to know what it's worth now," he told me. "This is possibly $400K and I'm freaking the fuck out. I'm a college student so this would change my life lmao," wrote one Reddit user last week. The user claimed to have bought 40 bitcoins in 2013 but can't remember the password now. "A few years ago, I bought about 20 euros worth of bitcoin, while it was at around 300eur/btc.," lamented another Reddit user earlier this week. "Haven't looked at it since, and recently someone mentioned the price had hit 10.000usd. So, I decided to take a look at my wallet, but found that it wasn't my usual password. I have tried every combination of the password variations I usually use, but none of them worked."
to remember.
Offer to split the recovered coins with all these people who've forgotten their passwords 50/50 if you can crack it. Sounds like a good earner.
I guess there is now a legitimate use for password cracking. If you have couple mil worth of bitcoins but locked out, hire people doing password cracking for living and train the system with your existing passwords. In practice, people use similar passwords and similar password setting techniques.
Eventually all bitcoin passwords will be lost. Without the ability to create new bitcoins, once the limit is reached, bitcoins will all eventually be lost. Bitcoin will fail for this reason.
How long until Bitcoin bubble crashes?
* 1 week
* 1 month
* 3 months
* 6 months
* 1 year
* 2 years
* 5 years
* Never! (aka Cowboy Neal is a Bitcoin billionaire)
Lose your password, lose your money forever.
Fucking morons. This is why a non-'anonymous' centralized system is desirable. Because at least your identity can be verified and you can get your money at a bank.
Captcha: Surreal. Yes, this whole situation very much is, isn't it?
Slashdot: Bitcoin, Network Neutrality and mdsolar's rants. Oh, and occasionally a story about Apple or Tesla.
See that "Preview" button?
You would think that the computation power needed for mining would be more profitable if it were used for password cracking.
For bitcoins it is not, for other coins it is. Bitcoin mining requires Application Specific hardware (ASIC). We are many years past the point where CPUs or GPUs could mine bitcoin. Other coins are still CPU/GPU mineable. Many believe it is important for a coin to be GPU mineable so that we can have the decentralization that blockchain theory assumes. Bitcoin no longer has such decentralization and is vulnerable, for example 70-80% of the mining power is located in a single country that is not known for a hands off approach to economics and finance.
How long until Bitcoin bubble crashes?
The crash is not scheduled until after bitcoin futures trading is implemented in the first half of 2018 and the put options are in place. :-)
Ha Ha!
The professor that spent $70? Tough luck, almost like buying a winning lottery ticket and losing it. The guy who bought 20*300 = 6000 euro worth of bitcoins and couldn't be bothered to remember/store the password? Moron. Personally I'm kicking myself for not getting in on this early, because it sounded interesting to me but then I tried to step outside my nerd bubble and thought nah, this will just be some weird nerd thing that "normal people" won't ever get in on. You feel a bit like the guy who turned down the Beatles, like who'd ever want that? Quite a few, it turns out...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Back in the day, the only places that I used for exchanging Bitcoin with other cryptocurrencies were sites like Mt. Gox and BTC-E. They both got busted by the feds for various criminal activities, so there is no active account left to log into.
I believe that the mining pools got hacked as well, so there isn't much hope checking if any residual balances left in those accounts as well.
Man... the security of the various Bitcoin exchanges sites really sucked back then. I wonder if it's really better now, or the next big hack is right around the corner.
While those Bitcoins are worth "something", the trick is all in cashing out and actually getting the money that people claim it is worth. If you can cash out, all's great. Otherwise it is just worthless numbers.
This strikes me as the time in the tulip futures to cash out.
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
seriously, how do you get through life without one ?
would have solved this problem very nicely.
Absolute statements are never true
Cryptocurrencies are all the rage recently, I never bother to look pass the news title, but today (idle Saturday morning in Asia), I just want to share an anecdote.
Six years ago, I joined a small startup, as a CTO and VP of Engineering, developing Internet platform (think about lots of users, lots of data, lots of files download/upload). The company got 10 millions in funding, had 15 developers, and had been working on the project for 18 months. When I joined, there was not a single document about any API, no protocol, and a dozen database schemas, conflicting with each other, and the front-end devs had never made a single call to the server yet. They have got about 20 fancy servers sitting in the data center, but the only software running on these machines was the BTC miner. Who did that? It was one of the company's founders, who was supposed to be the CTO, but he was busy mining his coins, instead of working on the project.
We threw away almost everything, restarted from scratch, and after 6 months, our first version went live. Another 4 months, we pushed a 2nd version live. By that time, our growth seemed to go exponential. We had about 60K new registered users every day, and that only represent about 40% of new daily users (not counting those who just free-loaded). And we got crazy DAU and time spent by each user too. The second year I was there, we raised another 40 millions. By the end of the second year, we had about 400 servers, and preparing for the next phase of growth. The investors were breathing on my neck, pushing for faster release, and faster growth. We had the wind in our sail. I was working 15 hours/day, 6 days/week.
One evening, the response time of the system seemed way too slow to be normal. I logged in from home to check, and guess what? Every fucking server was bogged down by miners, including our reverse proxy sitting in the DMZ, and even our database servers. I killed all the miners, and called the co-founder to ask if it was him who did it. In fact, he ran the miners as his own account, I just wanted to have his own admission. He just laughed, saying we had so many servers anyway, the spare cycle should not be wasted.
The next morning, I raised the issue in a meeting with the two co-founders, and I said I hope that no one would use the production servers for mining again. But instead, the other co-founder (a non-tech guy) found this mining thing pretty cool. The explicit consent spread quickly to the 3 sysadmins, along with the technical co-founder, all 4 of them are competing for CPU cycles to run their own miners. I was waging a guerilla war against them, running a script to kill the miners periodically.
After 6 months, I had enough. This co-founder who stopped working altogether after I joined, and spent all his time showing off his shiny virtual coins. When I left, we had millions of DAU. Half a year later, I heard that the DAU dropped to 20K and the investors pulled out, but I did not care any more. A couple of months later, the whole project folded.
Since that experience, I have avoided cryptocurrency mining people like pest.
Perhaps hypnosis could lead to some recollection of passwords.
"I have tried every combination of the password variations I usually use, but none of them worked."
You probably spelled it HypN0515.
Do you remember when you had all that cash in your wallet but couldn't remember how to take it out? Or when your debit card stopped working and you lost your entire bank balance forever?
Bitcoin is such a revolutionary technology if you're looking for unique ways for your average person to lose access to their own wealth.
If it wasn't checked in years, and all of the permutations of possible passwords don't work, maybe somebody hacked it in the interim, and the coins are gone anyways.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Because they are
It really is that simple.
read: Don't crash it until you can short it.
I "cashed out" a bitcoin last week, put down a 4x payment on my mortgage for this month.
You do realize that hundreds of millions of dollars are traded every day on the cryprocurrency exchanges, right ?
Go to coinbase.com (to pluck an example out of the air), log into your account. Do the 2FA thing with your cell phone. Type in how many btc or LTC or ETH you want to sell, wait a few days, and it appears in your bank account. It's easier than setting up a wire transfer...
Physicists get Hadrons!
Let's all buy Bitcoin! This will inflate indefinitely. We'll all be rich. Nobody's going to need to work, we're just going to invest.
That creampie wasn't very stealth...
you sound like someone that lives pay check to paycheck and knows nothing about investments. your opinion doesnt matter
I put in a decent amount few months ago. Easily doubled that so far.
Could I lose it all if cryptocurrencies crash? Sure. I kinda hope I do, because I'm more invested in the USD doing well. However, if I cash out, and this shit keeps going up and up and up, I'm going to be fucking pissed. So I'm in it for the long haul.
I'm VERY familiar with password cracking and I'd be interested in trying to crack some wallets. The success rate will completely depend on the strength of the passphrase and how much the person remembers. If they remember "I used three 'random' words I thought of", that'll be easy enough to crack. If they used 40 truly random characters, that's much, much harder.
all transaction will be unraveled with id and you cant even leave your country to some remote island currency
What were you thinking, man?
I wouldn't worry, people never cash out of bubbles when they should, they wait too long for the bubble to re-inflate. You would be the same.
Meanwhile the bubble crowd go after the next bubble. Fartarium or Bovinefaecarium.
When an asset's utility is that its price may rise because people are buying it, you have a fake asset bubble, and seeing Reddit, that's clearly a pump and dump asset.
You don't need to wait for the algo to be broken, such that its trivial to make new bitcoins, its enough to simply lose the concept of value.
Bitcoin is the headline act in a currency freak show to make the US dollar look almost respectable.
Before Bitcoin was on the scene, the US dollar had the spotlight on it for being a ridiculously over valued currency that was ripe for the crashing.
Bitcoin makes the US dollar look like a AAA investment.
Nothing in its fundamentals makes any sense whatsoever. Crazy 10 minute transaction times. Crazy electricity requirements to process transactions. Crazy reputation for being anonymous where the exact opposite is true.
But holy shit it makes total sense as a distraction.
Wishing all of you the best of good buys.
I don't have a bitcoin account nor any bitcoins!
You tell him! If he knew ANYTHING about the history of new age, dotcom, ninja loaning, modern, anything goes capitalism, he'd know investing these days requires jumping on whatever's hot right now, fundamentals be damned to hell!
Now you on the other hand...let me just say...I like the cut of your jib. I bet you have a huge penis too.
The thing about asset bubbles, is that people wait for them to go up further, and when they fall they hold on in the hope that they go up again, and as they start to take losses, they won't sell because they'd have to recognize the loss and their bad decision.
Everyone can make a fake story about how they sold a stock/asset/fake asset at the peak before the idiots got stiffed with the losses, but only a few are actually true. A lot of them are people trying to talk up the bubble again and recover some of the value.
aint 1
Don't it :)
Sucks. :)
Many believe it is important for a coin to be GPU mineable so that we can have the decentralization that blockchain theory assumes.
The problem with that idea is that it doesn't account for wide scale botnet mining. The Bitcoin situation will improve, as we get to the state of the art ASIC, and incremental improvements in ASICs will slow down. This should give other people a chance to catch up.
You remember your password, and that 100 BTC you have is now worth a theoretical $1.5 mil or more. Good luck doing anything with it.
Whether by design or happenstance, Bitcoin has been rendered useless by the small group of people who have been guiding it, namely the ones who call themselves Bitcoin Core (sounds all official and shit, huh? It's really not.) They fought tooth and nail to make BTC unscalable and really helped turn the legacy Bitcoin chain into the clusterfuck that it is today. Remember all that talk about Bitcoin adoption by merchants? That is now a thing of the past, because the lack of scaling has rendered Bitcoin pretty much useless. Unless you're moving large sums (in the multi thousand dollar range) then you're probably gonna have an issue with the transaction fees, unless paying between $10 and $100 seems acceptable to you. Oh yeah, the transactions. There's a little matter of the transaction backlog. It will take literally weeks for BTC transactions to go through, if ever. This is not an exaggeration. The backlog is just that bad.
You can put your BTC on an exchange, but good luck cashing out when you want some actual money. And you better hope nobody gets hacked (like happened yet again just this week.)
At least Bitcoin Cash scales, and has low fees like back in the day. Now if merchants can just start adopting it a little bit faster.
Suppose the real. tangible value of gold is $400 / ounce (approx the cost of a cheap mine), are people stupid for paying $1200 for it ? Are you laughing your ass off ?
Or do you assume the real, tangible price of gold is equal to whatever the current traded value is ?
One where the transactions are verified, through the time consuming task of cracking forgotten passwords on old Bitcoin wallets.
If it costs $85,000 worth of electricity to mine a wallet with 3 million dollars worth of coins?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
this will be fun! get the popcorn ready.
The Bitcoin transaction time and cost are already past the point where it is useful as a currency. With what you are describing, it will get far worse before it even has a chance to get better. If it's not useful as a currency, then what is it for? Right now, it just seems to be a gambling commodity for high-risk traders; similar to junk bonds, but, with a far higher chance of significant loss in a short amount of time.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
The Bitcoin transaction time and cost are already past the point where it is useful as a currency
Which has exactly nothing to do with the mining algorithm, and whether it runs on ASICs/CPUs or GPUs.
With what you are describing, it will get far worse before it even has a chance to get better.
No, what I was describing has nothing to do with transaction time and cost. I was talking about the mining distribution. If ASICs level off, it just means that it will be easier to get them distributed over more diverse operations. It changes nothing about the total mining expenses.
Many believe it is important for a coin to be GPU mineable so that we can have the decentralization that blockchain theory assumes.
The problem with that idea is that it doesn't account for wide scale botnet mining. The Bitcoin situation will improve, as we get to the state of the art ASIC, and incremental improvements in ASICs will slow down. This should give other people a chance to catch up.
It would be far simpler, in a technical sense not a political sense, for bitcoin to change its algorithm to an ASIC resistant one, as other coins are implemented with. There is nothing in blockchain theory that requires one particular algorithm. The early bitcoin devs just made a counterproductive choice, its software, that can be fixed.
My point was that a GPU based algorithm isn't necessarily better, because of the risk of botnet attacks.
I forgot my gmail password
There's just one tiny problem: to change the algorithm, you need a majority of the miners to agree. You know, those who just invested millions of dollars in ASICs. Good luck with that.
Maybe Bitcoin Cash could do it, though? Or a new fork?
CBOE is introducing bitcoin futures tomorrow evening (opening of Tokyo markets Monday morning). Get some popcorn, it will be interesting to watch the crash.
That I even had this problem in he first case. This is one tech bubble I wasnâ(TM)t on the bleeding edge for...now, I am shut out.
Hereâ(TM)s a question for those familiar with BTC...can you purchase fractional BTC on exchanges? If so, I would assume the easiest path would be to accept fractional BTC payments in lieu of standard cash for goods and services. And, how is that not bartering in the eyes of the tax law?
Seriously...just wondering how to get in on this now.
This is why a non-'anonymous' centralized system is desirable.
Nope. The forgotten passwords are a Good Thing, because each lost btc means mine are worth more.
You assume people will still want bitcoins at that point. :-)
It works for other currencies too. Several trillion dollars were pissed away in dot com bubbles, CDO/CDS and other zero-value instruments, housing bubbles, Madoff-styled schemes, endless wars... so now those pre-1982 pennies you under your couch cushions are worth almost twice their face value.
No worries, your bitcoins are in a safe place now. Sorted.
I didn't think Slashdot could get any worse, now we're getting Buzzfeed bullshit being posted as "news"
There's just one tiny problem: to change the algorithm, you need a majority of the miners to agree
No, you don't.
You need to majority of economic players to agree. They determine the value of the coin, and the value will attract the miners.
As compared to the Fed, Bank of England, Reserve Bank of $Country, etc etc.
Yeah i mined a few bitcoins perhaps 4, back when bitcoins were worth 30 cents and prompty forgot about it.
I am now using testdisk on some old hard drives trying to find my wallet.dat. no luck so far!
Its funny because i usually keep my entire appdata structure between computers, but i have no bitcoin folder that i can find, and i have only had 2 computers between 2009 and now. Maybe i hallucinated mining those coins? so much can happen in 8 years...
i can see why people are madly looking through thrift stores for old PCs now. Any PC recycling place would be an absolute gold mine.
-
I had a Bitcoin once, when the Bitcoin Faucet was generous. One day I was like "I'm not doing this. I can lose the Bitcoin or give it to somebody else". At least I hope FSF got it, as their bitcoin address came from cached Google results. They had a period where they thought receiving Bitcoin donations was bad and took the address down from their website.
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
The big Bitcoin mining farms are in China, not in the U.S.A.
#DeleteFacebook
This sort of issue is why, despite always thinking Bitcoin was a good and profitable idea, I've never purchased Bitcoins. The potential for something to go wrong is too high. If the price crashed or I lose my password or someone steals my hard drives or hacks my exchange account, or manages to install a keylogger on my system to grab my wallet password, etc then all the money I have in Bitcoin goes up in smoke. There is no insurance or recourse.
If I lose my real life wallet or my bank card or forget my banking PIN, then I just walk into a bank and get replacement ID and a new PIN. It's a ten minute process. If the bank is hacked or robbed, they have insurance and my account balance stays the same. The same applies for people with investments, if they lose their account password or misplace their investment statement, they just walk into their broker's office and get a new one.
Bitcoin is high reward, but also high risk. I prefer low yield and low risk. It won't make me rich, but I'm not likely to lose all my savings either.
12345
The other problem is that it's so difficult to extract keys from an old copy of wallet.dat. The stock Bitcoin client that should be able to read it requires a ~150GB download (not necessary for cloud-computing), rather than giving a very trivial tool that allows exporting these addresses into another application. It's as if the developers want to secure the file, without it actually being secure.
One other client crashed when trying to read wallet.dat. It must be getting snagged on some pattern of bits, as it also crashed when reading a plain-text variation of that file.
Importing/Exporting data is a solved problem, and defiantly critical to something like Bitcoin.
For example, at what point do people realize that Bitcoin is only useful to purchase certain items? This is not an investment instrument because it's not based on anything but actual hard currency. The fact that you can avoid taxes and visibility underscores the currency draw. One last thing, you do realize that purchasing Bitcoin inherently contributes to human trafficking among many other nefarious activities, and allows traffickers to exploit more people in everyday. Thank you Bitcoin/BC owners for enabling the exploitation of our young, and indeed mankind.
> > three 'random' words I thought of", that'll be easy enough to crack.
>> If they used 40 truly random characters, that's much, much harder.
Did you read that backwards? I said three "thought of" words is much easier than 40 truly random characters. You said no, the other way around - three words is much easier than 40 truly random characters. :)
i posted my bitcoin password on my twitter feed, so i can look it up anytime. problem solved.
... to one of our colleages, as a paper-wallet. Was worth ~ 60 Euros back then. Our colleage didn't make use of it, but when we asked him about this last month, he did look where he stashed it, and luckily, found the paper wallet after some hours of searching. Turns out to have been a valuable gift, after all :-)
Are the Fed and Bank of England claiming the US Dollar and British Pound are beyond government control, as some bitcoin enthusiasts claim for bitcoin?
so ... wtf is a professor of social technology? is this a real thing? and he can't remember a password?
In a similar vein, how long do y'all think the NFL will last?
I just read where Jerry Jones' Dallas Cowboys football team is worth $4.2 billion.
Perhaps.
But in our economic system, worth is determined by the buyer, not the seller.
That means bitcoin is 1) going to go up and down randomly and 2) it is dependent on an already existing market. It cannot hold the market up by itself like a dollar or renminbi.
You can put your house on the market for whatever price you think it can get. The price you actually get might be different.
Is there any consortium of millionaires or billionaires who think buying into the NFL is a good investment?
Granted, folks might buy a team for status, but there are baseball, basketball and hockey teams around.
I think the NFL begins dying for good once the next team goes up for sale. The Denver Broncos owners are trying to sell shares quietly.
It will die the same way bitcoin does. It won't ever disappear completely but soon, and suddenly, it will be completely irrelevant, and for the same economic reason(s).
This is why a non-'anonymous' centralized system is desirable.
Nope. The forgotten passwords are a Good Thing, because each lost btc means mine are worth more.
You assume people will still want bitcoins at that point. :-)
It works for other currencies too. Several trillion dollars were pissed away in dot com bubbles, CDO/CDS and other zero-value instruments, housing bubbles, Madoff-styled schemes, endless wars... so now those pre-1982 pennies you under your couch cushions are worth almost twice their face value.
In your examples currencies were not destroyed. Assets merely dropped in value, much like bitcoin has done on numerous occasions, losing 75+% of its value.
There's just one tiny problem: to change the algorithm, you need a majority of the miners to agree. You know, those who just invested millions of dollars in ASICs. Good luck with that. Maybe Bitcoin Cash could do it, though? Or a new fork?
ASICs loose value and become unprofitable to operate as the difficulty increases. With an algorithm change scheduled sufficiently in advance ASIC operators can simply plan to not replace/upgrade their current hardware as it becomes unprofitable.
Password managers, a generated hash, or a consistent system. Not p@$&w()®D128375. Good practices aren't just meant to keep people out, but to make sure you can get in.
If you want mine your own cryptocurrency, you need a motherboard with 19 PCIe 1X slots to plug in 19 GPUs and a couple of 1200W PSUs.