He has lost his Bitcoin wallet password, he still has 2 attempts to recover his 7002 BTC!
by Alexander Romero 
Stefan Thomas is potentially multimillionaire thanks to the thousands of bitcoins he holds in his IronKey Bitcoin wallet.
7,002 BTC, or more than $230 million in Bitcoin, awaits him on his bitcoin wallet whose password he has lost, as he told the New York Times.
This German IT developer living in San Francisco has indeed lost the paper where his password was written, giving access to these 7,002 BTC tokens which are now worth a fortune.
The IronKey bitcoin wallet has the particularity of leaving 10 attempts to type in its password, after ten attempts, the crypto wallet is permanently blocked.
This would mean that Stefan Thomas would lose his 7,002 BTC forever, which is now worth around 230 million dollars.
A story that recalls the importance of keeping safe your your bitcoin wallets passwords, if you lose access to your bitcoin wallet, your BTCs are lost forever.
Of the 21 million BTC that will be put into circulation, it is estimated that several million will be lost for this type of human error (lost/forgotten password, broken hard drives, lost or stolen computers, etc.).
If Stefan Thomas is to hope to get that $230 million worth of Bitcoin back, he doesn’t have many options other than trying to find the right password with the last two tries possible.
He had obtained these thousands of BTC in 2011, he had made a video called “What is Bitcoin?”, the client receiving this video had paid Stephan by giving him thousands of BTC which were not worth much at the time.
With only two tries left, he decided to put his bitcoin wallet aside in a safe place, in the hope that one day cryptographers would have the ability to crack complex passwords in order to give him back access to his bitcoin wallet which is worth a lot of money today.
Stefan Thomas tries to stay calm:
“I got to a point where I said to myself, ‘Let it be in the past, just for your own mental health.”
It is certain that losing 7002 BTC, or several hundred million dollars, can be difficult for anyone who is faced with such a situation.
While many crypto wallets rely on just a simple password or key, the Ledger Nano X has the advantage of having a list of keywords to keep in order to recover a Ledger wallet that is lost or unusable.
As with a password, you also need to securely store these recovery keywords.
