Startup says it can access $235M in locked bitcoin — but owner says 'no thanks'
Unciphered, a cryptocurrency recovery startup says it’s figured out how to crack an encrypted hard drive containing $235 million in bitcoin that has been locked for 12 years. The only problem is, the drive’s owner doesn’t want it to. As reported by Wired, the Seattle-based company says that after eight months of research, it’s managed to develop a process that allowed it access to a so-called IronKey USB thumb drive sent to it by Wired. Now, Unciphered says it’s ready to use the same technique on a drive that’s currently locked in a Swiss vault along with 7,002 bitcoin. The drive in question belongs to a Swiss crypto entrepreneur named Stefan Thomas. Thomas received the Bitcoin in 2011 for creating a video titled ‘What is Bitcoin?’ However, shortly thereafter, he lost the piece of paper on which he’d written the password. Since then, he’s used up eight of the 10 password attempts afforded to him by the IronKey before it erases the keys ...