Man who was given over $830m in Bitcoin in 2011 when it was worth just thousands lost his password to access it

In what sounds like the heartbreaking crypto sketch in The Big Bang Theory, one man has lost access to his $829m Bitcoin empire that he started with a few thousand dollars in 2011.

Back as kids, we used to throw pennies into a jar in the hope that enough spare change would amount to a fortune – back when a 99-cent popsicle was our best purchase.

When the tech age rose, our jars of spare change sat to collect dust, while gurus would be investing in this strange phenomenon called Bitcoin, doomed to fail – or so we thought.

Still, some decades and a half later, and one small bitcoin investment has amassed into a crypto haul for the ages – it just can’t be accessed.

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Swiss entrepreneur only has two out of ten guesses left to access his $220m bitcoin empire

Bitcoin is a notoriously tricky customer, but people who invested young have been laughing all the way to the bank, such as this teenager who became a millionaire after buying $1,000 worth of crypto as a 12-year-old.

But in a story of Bitcoin misery, Swiss entrepreneur Stefan Thomas once won 7,002 BTC in a competition, which was worth a few thousand bucks in 2011.

However, he lost the password to his encrypted IronKey S200 flash drive, which his account is on.

The IT whizz originally realised that he lost his password back in 2012 and has now used eight of ten guesses to gain access to his account since then – if he hits the final two, he’ll be locked out forever.

And what a bitter pill that would be to swallow, as his 7002 BC is now worth $829 million.

According to an exclusive story by Wired, Thomas has enlisted the help of hackers and engineers who are trying to bypass the USB flash drive’s password system.

But the old plucky memory stick is military-grade equipment, still used by the government today, and it’s proving impossible to crack.

While this life-changing sum would eat away at the average person, this is just one of many crypto ventures that Thomas started in the early 2010s, and he currently has ‘more riches than he knows what to do with’.

How much BTC is ‘lost’?

He wouldn’t be the first, and he won’t be the last, to lose millions on Bitcoin from old flash drives.

One particular man has been attempting to buy an entire landfill site because he knows that his $800m blockchain bounty is sitting within a USB within a bin bag there.

According to Fortune, as of 2024, there were 1.8 million ‘lost’ coins on the crypto site, which accounts for around $213,159,600,000 ($213 billion).

Still, some people are recovering more and more of these ‘lost’ wallets every day.

Just recently, one more happier turn of events saw a $7,800 14-year investment turn into a billion-dollar gold mine as he stepped into the wallet for the first time since making the plunge.

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