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Man has two more chances before $232M in Bitcoin is lost forever
- reportgunner 4y agoThe video where he explains how cryptocurrency works probably wasn't very good.
- compsciphd 4y agowhat's the point of storing a wallet on a self encrypting device that can "self destruct" vs just storing the data encrypted on a normal storage device? It seems its cutting off your nose to spite your face to an extent. Easy scenario, someone DoS you by causing the device to self destruct thereby you losing large amounts of money.
- Adriel5654 4y ago[dead]
- clacla778 4y ago[dead]
- throwaway5959 4y agoThe future of money ladies and gentlemen.
- labster 4y agoThe government can’t take away your hard-earned crypto if you lost it forever.
- computing 4y agoyou made a throwaway account to post this? Was this too hot a take for your real account ?
- throwaway5852 4y ago[flagged]
- grog_tremor 4y agoThat account is actually a few days old. My guess is that GP does the same as me. Create a throwaway account, use for a few weeks, then abandon it to create a new one. This account I'm posting from is close to EOL, for example.
- slater 4y agoWhy do that, though? Edited to add, it's also against the HN guidelines: "Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- throwaway5959 4y agoI didn’t and don’t do that. This account is 9 months old and my only account.
- slater 4y agoI was responding to grog_tremor.
- grog_tremor 4y agoI was unaware of the guidelines. For a long time I was only a lurker here. I won't contribute any other way however. Perhaps I don't feel comfortable having an "identity others can relate to". That said, off I go back to read-only mode. Arrivederci.
- TheHappyOddish 4y agoI do the same. Anonymity is important to some here and not others and I think that's fine, despite the guidelines.
- NoPicklez 4y agoThis is one of those scary things with a cryptocurrency based society that I worry about. We want decentralisation (supposedly), but this is one of the benefits of centralisation where I can speak to and very my identify with someone with authority to access my funds should I happen to lose my password/key. Bank's provide this protection. Perhaps I'm ignorant of other aspects/solutions. But this is my take with being solely responsible for access to my own funds.
- kaba0 4y agoIt’s like we have made laws/rules in society to prevent/solve a litany of edge cases when it comes to money. It has problems for sure, but crypto would just hard reset all that without even thinking about the consequences.
- rendx 4y agoI don't see how a "cryptocurrency based society" would actually work, but key management is not really the issue? You can give a copy of your key to a "bank" to hold (or even let them generate and keep it for you), use shamir's secret sharing schemes to split it for redundancy, etc. In a society where cryptocurrency was of any actual relevance, services and tools would be widely available to assist, just like you need to interface with and learn about banks today. Plenty of people in the world are still unbanked and even from those that are I would assume plenty "prefer to store cash in their mattresses".
- arcticbull 4y agoInvolving a third party in key management like a bank is entirely antithetical to the principles espoused in the white paper. Trustlessness is all or noting, and once you trust someone you are just doing what we do now but far less efficiently. A classically envisioned crypto society requires individual custody, or to borrow a turn of phrase “not your keys not your coins.” Most people are unbanked not because banks don’t exist for them but because they don’t have money to put into an account. In the US online banks like Ally or Schwab are way better for folks who are legitimately unbanked than a crypto wallet - esp one they are unlikely to properly custody. Postal banking is an approach that has been historically hugely successful too. Outside the US honestly I don’t know how folks wouldn’t be better served with for instance access to an account at circle.com vs USDC. People not having money is a social problem that deserves a meaningful social solution - not digital magic beans.
- flangola7 4y agoOnly 2 attempts left? Just clone the drive and run hashcat against it, I don't see the problem here.
- plantain 4y agoit's on an IronKey.
- netsharc 4y agoThe drive's firmware could be preventing that from happening: https://www.trentonsystems.com/blog/self-encrypting-drives https://www.trentonsystems.com/blog/self-encrypting-drives Although I don't think they have the auto-destruct feature. But with 200M+ at stake, I'd put out a bounty for someone to reverse engineer the firmware. Edit: sibling commenter says it's IronKey, reading about it, reverse engineering won't be that trivial...
- filmgirlcw 4y agoIt wouldn’t be. You’d think for a $50m or even $100m bounty, you could get people who hoard 0-days like Cellebrite to do it. I don’t know. If it were me, I would easily give up half of it to get the money back.
- loyski 4y agoYou think they didn't thought about it?
- edrxty 4y agoReading between the lines I think he has some sort of weird ass hardware coin wallet/high security encrypted flash drive that has some anti tamper smarts. I think the journalist used the word encrypted wrong here: >Thomas has just two attempts left to guess the password before it's encrypted and lost forever. I suspect they meant the drive would wipe itself after another attempt. You could attempt to pull the controller chip and decap to extract the secondary key which would allow you unlimited attempts
- jki275 4y ago
- sega_sai 4y agoIt's a weird news. For sure there must be plenty of people who for say 10M$ would find the vulnerability or reverse engineer the whole thing.
- pclmulqdq 4y agoSome of these encrypted hard drive devices are weirdly secure. However, I can't see any harm in offering a bug bounty of 1/4th of the stash, putting up the model and serial number of the drive, and seeing who can crack it the fastest.
- filmgirlcw 4y agoI think you’d probably need a team that could clone the drive first and then you could do your attempts. From what I understand, that’s difficult here because of the encrypted flash drive he used (tho obviously not impossible). I’m sure someone like Cellebrite or the other agencies that have done iPhone hacking could do something like this — or at least figure out how to clone the drive to do multiple attempts at getting into it - but I don’t know how many places would do it on someone’s word that the crypto is there. Like, yeah, for 25%, I bet you could find people who could get it done. But I don’t know how many of those people who would undertake that work on a promise. What if it’s like Al Capone’s vault [1] and turns up empty? [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_Al_Capone%27s_Vaults https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_Al_Capone%27s...
- jmount 4y agoI think the comment above is: "show me cracking a similar drive with nothing on it" as a capabilities test.
- maerF0x0 4y agoif they could crack it for 1/4, why would they give him any of it? "Sorry, we couldn't crack it, bye"
- 4y ago
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y agoThe longer he waits, the less money he will lose in Bitcoin. A year ago, he would have lost $500M, maybe next year his losses will be down to $100M
- ashwagary 4y ago>maybe next year his losses will be down to $100M His losses will most likely increase next year as the bitcoin block reward halving is followed by an increase in price every cycle.
- gmane 4y agoHonestly, at this point he should try to sell the drive to someone for a fraction of the money.
- jakeinspace 4y agoI could see some eccentric billionaire paying a hundred grand to display it as an art piece.
- computing 4y ago[flagged]
- xiphias2 4y agohttps://www.kingston.com/en/solutions/data-security/ironkey https://www.kingston.com/en/solutions/data-security/ironkey What's interesting here that even if Kingston would be able to help, it might not worth for them to do it because of their reputation (and $13B revenue)
- motohagiography 4y agoHow much is he asking for the drive? I bid $500.00 USD.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- BlamSthzusa 4y agoThis might have been a mistake.
- karmakaze 4y agoWorth keeping in mind that your own failing memory or poor information organization likely tops most threat models in practice.