Almost 4 billion euros in the game. Father and son help people return lost cryptocurrettes, in which they forgot passwords

Investors and speculators with cryptocurrencies are mostly interested in their price appreciation and potential profit from the subsequent sale of the position. However, every year there are more cases of owners of bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies who have forgotten or lost the passwords from their wallets and are unable to work up their wealth.

One of the best known cases is programmer Stefan Thomas, which has lost the slogan for its cryptocurrette with more than 7,000 bitcoins, the value of which is currently around 276 million euros.

If they do not get into the wallet, the client pays nothing

As the portal informed Business Insider, Chris and Charlie Brooks are trying to help such people. Father and son have been running the company since 2017 Crypto Asset Recoverywhich gives clients the opportunity to recover lost cryptocurrencies.

The couple first asks the client for the best possible list of possible passwords, and then together they try to find out how they thought when entering the password into their wallet. They then create hundreds of millions or billions of password variations and test them on an encrypted version of a locked crypto-wallet.

The time it takes for a pair of experts to decipher a wallet can be five seconds, but also a month and a half. Clients sometimes send them a list of passwords that also contains the correct one. In other cases, such a so-called brute force guessing passwords by trial and error is much harder.

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Clients first sign an affidavit stating that they are indeed the owner of the crypto-wallet. Chris and Charlie retain their payment based on a commission determined by the size of the property in the locked wallet.

If the wallet contains from 0 to 10 bitcoins, they will take a 20% commission from the amount. However, if they fail to get to the bottom, the client pays nothing.

Forgetting a password is nothing special, polls say

According to the January report New York Times and Chainalysis’s estimate is as much as 20% of the then 18.5 million bitcoins in circulation (currently more than 18.8 million, editor’s note) lost or stuck in similarly locked wallets.

Recent analysis Cryptovantage confirms that almost 40% of Americans have ever lost their passwords for their cryptocurrencies, with an average “unavailable” amount of € 1,800.

Almost 4 billion in lost bitcoins

However, Chris Brooks went into business after he appeared on the well-known BitcoinTalk forum, the creation of which is associated with Satoshi Nakamoto himself, fiber titled „Let’s add up the KNOWN lost bitcoins“, tj “Let’s count all known lost bitcoins”. This includes contributions from people with the amount of bitcoins they lost, and Brooks came to an interesting conclusion after a thorough analysis of the entire thread.

According to information from 72 articles, which describe the loss of at least half of bitcoin, about 14% are cases in which it is possible to get into the crypto-wallet after guessing the password.

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This, combined with the fact that a pair of experts can statistically decrypt about 35% of passwords, shows that it could be possible to recover about 2.45% of all lost bitcoins, ie about 68,100 to 92,855 bitcoins, which have a value of about 2 .7 to 3.7 billion euros.

In conclusion, it should also be recalled that statistics and calculations still speak only of bitcoin, but there may be a pile of other cryptocurrencies worth millions or even billions of euros on lost wallets.