Wallet Recovery Firms Buzz as Locked-out Crypto Investors Panic in Bitcoin Boom

The recent surge in bitcoin prices has the phones at crypto wallet recovery firms ringing off the hook, as retail investors locked out of their digital vaults make frantic calls to regain access to their accounts. From a report: Cryptocurrencies exist on a decentralized digital ledger known as blockchain and investors may opt to access their holdings either through a locally stored software wallet or a hardware wallet, to avoid risks related to owning crypto with an exchange, as in the case of the former FTX. Losing access to a crypto wallet is a well-known problem. Investors forgetting their intricate passwords is a primary reason, but loss of access to two-factor authentication devices, unexpected shutdowns of cryptocurrency exchanges and cyberattacks are also common.

Wallet passwords are usually alphanumeric and the wallet provider also offers a set of randomized words, known as "seed phrases," for additional security - both these are known only to the user. If investors lose the passwords and phrases, access to their wallets is cut off. With bitcoin prices regaining traction since last October and hitting a record high of $73,803.25 in March, investors seem to be suffering from a classic case of FOMO, or the fear of missing out. Reuters spoke to nearly a dozen retail investors who had lost access to their crypto wallets. Six of them contacted a recovery services firm and managed to regain access to their holdings.

If you scam, scam the idiots

[TheNameOfNick]

Add a touch of desperation and you've got an obvious mark.

Cashing out

[stikves]

Bitcoin market cap is over a trillion dollars now, along with others like Ethereum, it might be reasonable to double this amount for all crypto, maybe even more.

The problem is, when it goes up, people want to cash out, which is naturally causing a slowdown / tapering of the upward movement. That by itself is not an issue, however bitcoin having little intrinsic value outside of the ticker price is a large one. Unlike government issues currencies which has a value because they are needed to pay taxes, or gol

Re: Cashing out

[Chess_the_cat]

Any two parties? Really? You mean any two parties with the technology they need and who buy in to the idea of Bitcoin. US greenbacks are still going to get me out more situations worldwide than an entry in a public ledger.

Re:

[NFN_NLN]

> US greenbacks are still going to get me out more situations worldwide

The primary situation your greenbacks are going to get you out of is you getting mugged. If the s hits the f you're going to get robbed.
Guns are evil so we know you won't have one. ;)

Try doing that with no computers

[nocoiner]

bitcoin has value because because it can be transferred between any 2 parties on earth, at will, bypassing governments, national borders, banks, gatekeepers of all kinds.

Try that with any legacy currency and report back to us about how they have value and bitcoin does not.

Try exchanging bitcoin (or any other crypto) with no computers or electricity. No no, go on, try it.

Re:

[ncc74656]

Try exchanging bitcoin (or any other crypto) with no computers or electricity.

Have you not heard of paper wallets [bitaddress.org]? Print one out, transfer some bitcoin onto it, hand it over to somebody. You probably want to write the amount on it somewhere. You can pass it around among people indefinitely.

For a slightly more sophisticated method, there's this note generator [alfter.us] that provides standard denominations and a method for the private key to be obscured non-destructively.

Both do ultimately rely on the proper functi

Re:

[Jason Earl]

I am basically the opposite of a crypto expert. However, I do know enough about cryptography in general to know that this basically can't work. There is no way that I would trust a stranger, who had just handed me a piece of paper with a QR code on it, unless I could verify the QR code. In fact, it wouldn't even be enough to verify the QR code. I would want to move the funds into my own wallet first. After all, the stranger could easily have an accomplice that withdrew the money the second that I verif

Re:

[PPH]

Unlike government issues currencies which has a value because they are needed to pay taxes,

Bitcoin is still needed to pay the taxes owed by idiots who run unsecured corporate networks. Dimitri, the tax collector will be around shortly with the bill.

Re:

[alvinrod]

The intrinsic value of BitCoin is that a government doesn't control it. Whatever amount of money you have in your bank accounts now is completely worthless if the government decides to run the printing press and causes hyperinflation. Most governments are sane enough not to do this, but some people have the misfortune of living in a country where people in charge are utterly incompetent to an extent that makes our idiot politicians and bureaucrats look like paragons of virtue by comparison. Even better if y

Is the 'I forgot' factor still over 10%?

[Canberra1]

Great business running an exchange, knowing 10% will loose their keys, and this is before that population reaches over 60 where hat attack or dementia can knock them out. On the flip side, is unchecked owners and zero day exploits on fallible hardware, with unknown CPU flaws that can read cache baked into the silicon.

Re:

[Xenna]

If you think that the contents of an unclaimed wallet go to the exchange. They don't.

They're lost forever without hope of recovery. We call this a donation to the community because the more Bitcoin is lost, the more scarce it will become.

Re:

[anegg]

The Highlander conjecture: Assuming that Bitcoin continues to be lost at some non-zero rate, after enough time passes "There can be only one" and that person will hold all of the Bitcoin that is available for trade.

I'd like to this puzzle, Pat

[93 Escort Wagon]

A f__l an_ his m_ney are s__n _arte_.

Please help

[vbdasc]

Investors forgetting their intricate passwords is a primary reason

Yesterday I lost my wallet with about 10 000 dollars in bank notes in it. Who can help me recover my loss?

Idiots, idiots everywhere.

Re:

[ledow]

I was around at a time when you could have several Bitcoin and barely pay anything whatsoever for them.

It'll be those kinds of people who now want to cash in.

I found 0.3 of a Bitcoin I owned a few years back - I had never paid for Bitcoin, it came from free things like "the bitcoin faucet" and I only had it out of interest to play about with this programming paradigm (blockchain) that had come along.

I made good use of it when I discovered it. Got a few $100 of value out of it for nothing.

That same amount w

Re:

[haruchai]

a former colleague's golf buddy found an old Bitcoin wallet he'd forgotten about from 10 years ago; cashed in for around $200k

Re:

[ncc74656]

I found 0.3 of a Bitcoin I owned a few years back - I had never paid for Bitcoin, it came from free things like "the bitcoin faucet" and I only had it out of interest to play about with this programming paradigm (blockchain) that had come along.

I made good use of it when I discovered it. Got a few $100 of value out of it for nothing.

Years ago, I mined a block with the spare time on the VPS I used for my websites, mail, etc. That was 50 BTC, dropped into my hands. A year or two later, I got the idea to us

Re:

[jours]

A lot of us who were around for early Bitcoin have similar stories. The thing is, I neverwould have held them until they were worth "$1 million or $2 million" because I didn't believe in it. Neither did you. If you hadn't sold them at $650, you would have sold them at $6,500. And if you didn't sell them then, you sure as heck would have sold them at $65,000. And so forth. Yes, if you still had your 50 bitcoin, you'd be retired. But also if you bought and held Apple through the pre-iPhone years. Or i

Re:

[christoban]

Yes, YOU should buy, smarty pants.

Re:

[Xenna]

Slashdot wasn't so negative in the early days. Problem is that only the salty nocoiners are left now.

(some of us stick around to rub it in)

Hahaha!

[chthon]

Hahahaha!

Heat death of Bitcoin

[Chess_the_cat]

It is conceivable that one day every Bitcoin user will be locked out of their wallet because of lost passwords. The number of coins is finite after all. Then what?

Re:

[Baron_Yam]

I hate crypto, it's fundamentally fatally flawed and incredibly inefficient. Which of course is why its primary use cases are extortion, fraud, money laundering, and gambling.

Having said that, running out of coins isn't really an issue. So long as there is even a single controllable ledger entry, the community can decide to move the decimal place over as many places as required to have enough units to move around. If 99% of bitcoin coins are thought to be lost (you can never really know, after all), the

Re:

[jbmartin6]

Possibly advances in cryptography will enable 'miners' to crack older wallets with outdated key algorithms

I'm Retarded

[bill_mcgonigle]

I have a wallet somewhere with a half a bitcoin I bought on a lark for $24 but I was too retarded to properly store the passphrase and didn't remember it years later.

That made me *incompetent* to manage a digital currency at the time. Pre- seed phrases and ubiquitous password managers, but come on.

Kinda like when I didn't keep backups back when Slashdot first posted about Bitcoin and I did some CPU mining and got me some block rewards. It was like just helping out the network, like running a tor relay, at the time. No sense of future value.

Yikes.

Re:

[Gravis Zero]

It's for the best because bitcoin has a deeply negative intrinsic value that grows exponentially.

Tragedy

[CEC-P]

So I had over 150 BTC in 2011. Sold em at a year long high at the time of $3.85 each. Oops. But I had a corrupted wallet that I have given up on way back when. Found the file when consolidating old backups. Sent it to the best repair and recovery guy on the planet and all 400+ keys were recoverable but represented zero balances. There was a multi-week gap where I could have received a mining payment or forum tip jar payment of probably 0.5 to 1.5 BTC. SO THAT SUCKS.
Pales in comparison to the amount of othe