Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
You would think that the computation power needed for mining would be more profitable if it were used for password cracking.
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.
Nah. The parts of the coins that remain will just become more valuable. So even if the world is left with a few million wallets with less than a single usable BTC in each, it will be fine. Satoshi could have picked 21 million or 12 million or 1.2 million. It would still be the same.
I was just thinking the same thing. Brute forcing the wallet probably is a fraction of mining a single BTC but supposedly you can get hundreds for the same work.
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. :-)
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. :-)
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.
It's also why encrypted email will always stay even less popular than the Linux desktop. (I decides that on the day I went to decrypt some "old" encrypted mail, and realized I'd forgotten the pass phrase.)
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
seriously, how do you get through life without one ?
would have solved this problem very nicely.
Absolute statements are never true
You're an idiot. Head over to gdax and once you bank account is linked you can transfer like $20k a day...
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
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.
Which leads to a world where if other people can't steal your wallet, at the very least it makes financial sense for them to try to destroy it, so their own BTC will be more valuable. Think of all the people who (even today) can't be bothered to keep backups of critical files, and lose all their data when their computer is lost, is stolen, or crashes. Think of all the people who lose or forget their passwords. Over time, it is inevitable that more and more BTC will become inaccessible.
Think of a brave new cryptocurrency world where a crashed hard drive impoverishes a family, with no hope of recovery. Think of a world where stealing or destroying the life savings of others is effectively impossible to prosecute, and completely impossible to reverse or repair. And this is somehow supposed to be a good thing?
I expect that a decade from now, most of us will look back on the cryptocurrency craze, shake our heads, and say to ourselves, "What in the world was everyone thinking?"
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.
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!
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.
Sell 10% of your stash every time the price rises 20%. So if you had 10 bitcoins, sell one at 15k, 0.9 at 18k, 0.8 at 22k. You slowly take profit, while never running the risk of selling them all and then forever kicking yourself if they moon to a million bucks each.
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.
Which leads to a world where if other people can't steal your wallet, at the very least it makes financial sense for them to try to destroy it
This is also true for dollars, diamonds, and gold. They are valuable because they are scarce.
It's designed to give a true reading of USD inflation since the fed stopped reporting the money supply. Current indication is that USD inflation is fucking high.
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
Right? Fucking september that never ended, man.
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
No this is not true. It never ceases to fucking amaze me how people fail to understand the differences between "things" like bitcoin and things with inherent value.
I expect that a decade from now, most of us will look back on the cryptocurrency craze, shake our heads, and say to ourselves, "What in the world was everyone thinking?"
They were thinking they could get something for nothing. The same thing people in ponzi schemes always think.
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 ?
None of those things have "intrinsic value." Dollars have value because we say they do. Diamonds have value because we say they do (yes, they are pretty, but if that's really the basis, then cubic zirconium should be worth at least 30% that of a similarly sized diamond). Gold... well, you get the point.
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.
There are a few hard drive and usb's in landfill I remember one article mentions 7500 bitcoins in 2013 then worth 4million pound if you want to look for buried treasure and there a few more you google
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
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.
Nope right back at you. The problem with the BTC public ledger is there's no way to identify currency out of circulation. The value of your bitcoin won't ever change without a system to clearly mark stranded coins. The system says there are X bitcoins on the market and supply and demand will play a role with that assumption of X.
Yes, but, the typical person can't get their hands on a nuke to make your gold worthless and stealing your gold leaves a physical trail of evidence. But, any script kiddie can get a file encryption malware to make your wallet non-accessible and as long as they don't directly try to profit off your coins, there's likely no evidence trail to follow.
"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.
The value of your bitcoin won't ever change without a system to clearly mark stranded coins
Yes it will. If the guy with the 7500 bitcoins hadn't lost his harddisk, he probably would have sold them at some point, increasing the circulation.
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.
At $21,000 per btc the smallest denomination you can get is $0.001. at $210,000btc per use the smallest is 0.01
This doesn't sound so bad until you know finance people require transactions down to $0.0001 and more pressing are the transaction fees which go into the $20 range which makes buying anything less than $200 not worth it. As the fees are 10% of : to &.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
My point was that a GPU based algorithm isn't necessarily better, because of the risk of botnet attacks.
Define "inherent 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?
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.
You can make BTC wallets that can be recovered with some memorized words.
If you can memorize 'correct horse battery staple' you can flee your burning home with nothing and still have access to your wallets.
If there's a need for smaller denominations, the protocol can be adjusted.
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.
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.
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 longer-term intention is for bitcoin to act as a clearing layer on top of a separate microtransaction layer.
The specification for the microtransaction layer (known as lightning network) is now published, and this specification uses a smaller denomination (1e-11 of 1 BTC) which is only rounded when payments are cleared to the bitcoin network.
The big Bitcoin mining farms are in China, not in the U.S.A.
#DeleteFacebook
And today, those 7500 Bitcoins are now worth 87834954 British Pounds.
#DeleteFacebook
12345
Don't be an idiot. You don't need to nuke gold to destroy it. All you need to do is throw your gold at the Sun with a really big slingshot.
#DeleteFacebook
What he means is, given a wallet address, how do you determine if the coins are lost or the owner is simply holding to them in order to sell them later?
#DeleteFacebook
Glad I could help make yours worth more.
I didn't forget my password, I deleted my wallet.
When BitCoin was first started, I thought -- hmm that is neat, and started mining. I had mined at least 40 or 50 BTC and then I wasn't getting any more after a few months so I shut it down. BTC still wasn't worth anything, and you couldn't do anything with it like you can now, so I just left it and forgot about it.
I was getting rid of the PC that had the wallet on it, and didn't think twice when I shredded the drive. That could have bought me a fairly nice house. *sigh*
I do think BTC is a bubble -- right now, but there are only so many BTC to be mined, and once there are no more, I think the price will stabilize and it will be a useful currency -- even more useful than a government backed currency since no one can just "print" more.
-- http://anonet.org -- The internet the way it was meant to be. Check it out, you may be surprised.
Replace "cryptocurrency" with "money" and it's the same thing.
Selfish assholes will always be selfish assholes.
#DeleteFacebook
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.
> > 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 got on the bitcoin bandwagon early on and let my miner run for a few weeks, but it kept showing a wallet of 0.00Bc, so I turned it off. I thought at the time it was either a rounding off or I did something wrong, turned it off and never used it again. Maybe I should fire it again see if that rounding error somehow turned into a winning lottery ticket. I'm sure it's on one of my many backups.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
how do you determine if the coins are lost or the owner is simply holding to them in order to sell them later?
You wait until "later".
Yes it will. If the guy with the 7500 bitcoins hadn't lost his harddisk, he probably would have sold them at some point, increasing the circulation.
The value of currency is based on supply and demand, not movement. No one is sitting around staring at people wallet checking for their movement. All they know is the total in circulation.
... 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 :-)
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).
They also use cold hard US dollars, cash on hand - recommendations for that?
Vote Republican, implement trickle down economics, and wait for the dollar to crash.
That'll show them danged terrorists.
Wonder if he tried his wife's name, the dogs name... password1234...
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.