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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."
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 tried hypnosis. It didn't work. My hypnotherapist's new boat is nice though.
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. :-)
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.
seriously, how do you get through life without one ?
would have solved this problem very nicely.
Absolute statements are never true
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'
It really is that simple.
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.
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.