Two guys that have lost their Bitcoins forever

[passwordnow]

The first guy is named Stefan Thomas who has forgotten his password and has got 2 attempts left to access it. The wallet has got 7,002 Bitcoins as per this article. Stefan Thomas has 2 guesses left before he's locked out of his fortune forever

The estimation of that holding is around close to $200M at the current price of $28,000. While in the old articles it was around $321M or more based on the past ATH.

[...]The San Francisco software developer and CEO was an early adopter of bitcoin. Back in 2011, he produced an animated video explaining how the digital currency works. For his efforts, a bitcoin enthusiast awarded him 7,002 bitcoins.

Later that year, he lost the password to his IronKey, the USB hard drive that contains the digital wallet that holds his bitcoins. Since then, the currency's value has skyrocketed, and Thomas' holdings are worth $220 million US ($321 million Cdn.)[..]

This is him:


Photo source


While the other guy is named James Howell.
The story of this guy is different beacuse he threw away his HDD that contains 8,000 Bitcoins on 2013. He's got some proposal to use AI to clean the landfill but the management can't just agree to it.

A computer engineer who accidentally threw away a hard drive containing approximately £150m worth of bitcoin plans to use artificial intelligence to search through thousands of tonnes of landfill.

James Howells discarded the hardware from an old laptop containing 8,000 bitcoins in 2013 during an office clearout and now believes it is sitting in a rubbish dump in Newport, south Wales.

This is him:


Photo source


These are just the few of the many that have lost their Bitcoins forever while there's just little to no chance for both of them to recover it, so we can conclude that they're totally lost forever. Should they give up or accepted that they're lost forever, these lost Bitcoins are like a donation to the community as its value retained on the market capitalization of Bitcoin.

Lesson; Always back up your seed phrase, password, recovery phrases, private keys that has access to your Bitcoins and wallets.

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[The Cryptovator]

I heard about the second guy and how he lost his hard drive and Bitcoi. I feel really sorry for them, though losing Bitcoin means donations for the entire Bitcoin community. I don't feel they could recover their bitcoin, especially the second person. It's quite impossible to recover hard drive storage, even after he finds his device. It might already be damaged, and the date would be destroyed. However, people weren't thinking too deeply about Bitcoin at the beginning. That's why they lost their funds. Now people are starting to secure their funds since we realised the value of Bitcoin.

[Yatsan]

Is the second guy the same person who used robot dogs or something like that, to look for his HDD? But going back, we cannot blame them for being too eager to get back with their lost assets due to its huge value. It is easy to say that we should take extra care with important things, which is correct, but we are talking about early investors of Bitcoin. It might be because they did not see its potential before which did not push them to be more protective as with us today. Remember the guy who used multiple bitcoins for a pizza? They are just having regrets now ‘coz they already saw how huge it value would be but if we would place ourselves on the time they lost it, we night as well suffer with the same problem by now.

[bitmover]

The first guy made a double mistake.

Using wallets we can access our coins in two ways: password and seed.

He lost the seed and the password, containing millions of dollars.  This is so basic, but we need a back up and a back up of the back up. Everyone needs the second backup

[taufik123]

This is a story of the past that continues to be talked about, but even so stories about losing Bitcoin like this make us as users or who still want to have bitcoin must be careful about the security of private keys and wallets owned.
 
Don't let this happen to us when holding quite a lot of Bitcoin or altcoins that have potential in the future.
A clear loss like this will be very painful and all efforts have been made to open the wallet or search for an HDD containing thousands of Bitcoins.

Create a backup that is safe, easy for you to access and safe from others and of course everything can be accessed properly.

[hatshepsut93]

People lost such huge value at today's price because back then those thousands of coins were only worth a few bucks. Would you setup a robust storing system for $5, or would you just write down the words and put the paper somewhere in your room?

But yes, it's a good cautionary tale to illustrate how easy it is to permanently lose coins. Everyone who owns Bitcoin should have many different backups that can't fail all at once.

[Oasisman]

Well, it's easy to forget something or put a little to no attention to it when it doesn't have value yet. This happens to us in our daily life, not just only with Bitcoin. There were a lot of things that we ignore, but turns out to be completely useful on the latter.
These guys might have never thought of backing up their wallets or tried to secure them because they didn't see this one coming. Nobody was expecting bitcoin to be valued this high. So, I understand where these guys are coming from, they have lost a huge amount of money, but there's nothing much they can do about it because it already happened.
This will now serve as a lesson for those who planned to put their money into something and then totally forget about it when good things didn't happen in like a couple of years.

[Sarah Azhari]

These are just the few of the many that have lost their Bitcoins forever while there's just little to no chance for both of them to recover it, so we can conclude that they're totally lost forever. Should they give up or accepted that they're lost forever, these lost Bitcoins are like a donation to the community as its value retained on the market capitalization of Bitcoin.

yes sure, we have to thank to them. Because they lost 15,000 BTC, that make the bitcoin supply was limited. and maybe enough to make a new ATH if the request always is the same as the missing one. There was nothing they could do now, they were just giving up, and let's try to start Bitcoin again from zero. So if they continue to wail and keep trying to restore what they was lost that will waste a lot of time and energy. As I know, many people out there has lost their Bitcoin were greater than Stefan and James, but it was not revealed to the public because they were realize it could not be returned to their pocket again.

[Yamane_Keto]

These are just the few of the many that have lost their Bitcoins forever while there's just little to no chance for both of them to recover it, so we can conclude that they're totally lost forever. Should they give up or accepted that they're lost forever, these lost Bitcoins are like a donation to the community as its value retained on the market capitalization of Bitcoin.

Technologies are developing day after day, and recovering these coins may give a value greater than their actual value because they are proof, for example, of the device’s efficiency in searching for junk, or proof that data can be recovered from an old USB, even though I thought that the actual data lifespan for a USB is less than 10 years. If we assume that this USB is from 2011, we can consider that this data has already been lost.

It is impossible to say that these currencies have been lost, but they will definitely not have the same value as current currencies due to the additional costs of recovering them, and you may not succeed in doing that.

I think that preparing a multi-signature wallet is a better option, as we have had devastating natural disasters in recent years.

[SquirrelJulietGarden]

I did not know about the first man but knew about the second man who is famous, James Howell with his attempt to dig a massive landfill to recover the hard disk back. I don't know will the first man retrieves his coins back but the second man surely lost it forever.

His attempt to convince the county to approve him to dig the landfill is impossibly be accepted. Even he has their approval, it is still impossible to have a usable, recoverable disk.

The story of first man is a red flag for anyone who don't make good wallet backups. They always have to back up their wallets as accidents can occur and they must have backups to use and recover wallet.

Ignoring the loss of that man, I thank you for sharing the story because the man story is interesting as it contains another massive giveaway in early days of Bitcoin community history. Pizzas, faucet from Gavin Andresen and awards in a Star Craft game. They are all massive award, giveaway, faucet in bitcoin amount.

[digaran]

Can you see the irony? He produced  an animated video about how crypto works but  why didn't he listen to his own words, of course if the video had anything to do with wallet/security, one has to wonder though, if he was considering bitcoins to be valuable, that's why he kept them in that stupid usb drive right? Why didn't he create a back up for it and put it in a deposit box? After all he was protecting something valuable.

[mamesso]

The story of these two people continues to be discussed because they lost their opportunity to become billionaires due to their mistakes. Both stories are almost the same, because they ignore how important access to opening a wallet is. The heartbreaking incident experienced by both of them is a valuable lesson for the next generation who want to be involved and are already involved in Bitcoin, always be careful about maintaining and saving access to open wallets even if the assets contained in them are small. I can never imagine how both of them would feel due to their negligence or ignoring how important access to opening a wallet is, they would be very depressed and continue to think about assets that could never be cashed out again.

[Darker45]

Not yet forever I guess. Have they completely given up all hope? In the first case, there are still two last attempts. In the second case, last I heard the man was still looking for ways to locate that multimillion-dollar hard drive.

If in the end they both lost all those coins, I thank them for the donations. That's more than 15,000BTC. A big donation for everybody.

Lost coins only make everyone else's coins worth slightly more.  Think of it as a donation to everyone.

On the same thread where Satoshi mentioned this, Gavin Andresen, the man to whom Satoshi entrusted his/her/their creation before he/she/they left, had this prophetic thing to say:

And the more valuable they become, the more careful people will be not to lose them.

It's unfortunate both men got those coins much earlier. Mr. Thomas wouldn't have lost that password; Mr. Howells wouldn't have accidentally thrown away that hard drive had those coins were already worth millions.

[YUriy1991]

Today, we're near the 19.5 million mark, and what OP said is true and it's estimated that millions of Bitcoins have been lost by people throwing away their wallets or forgetting their private keys. But behind all this maybe users need to look for this type of wallet which is the safest where the user does not need to open his private key to the network and Hopefully, We now understand what Bitcoin is and why everyone in this world is going crazy for it.

[CryptoBuds]

Lesson; Always back up your seed phrase, password, recovery phrases, private keys that has access to your Bitcoins and wallets.

I think that only happened in the past when bitcoin didn't have too much value and many people didn't have faith in it. But that will be difficult to happen these days when everyone knows the value and potential of bitcoin in the future. I even know many people who only hold a handful of bitcoins but are also very concerned about protecting their seed phrase carefully, let alone those who hold large amounts of bitcoin. Things have changed a lot because the value of bitcoin is huge now.

[adaseb]

Haven’t heard about IronKey. Was this some hardware wallet? Back then didn’t think they existed. It seems it’s some encrypted usb drive by Kingston.

So just wondering how he only has 2 tries left. Can’t he just clone the usb and keep trying using different PINs until he gets it correct. I know there was a vulnerability with a Trezor or Ledger a few years back that had a vulnerability which could be bypassed if the PIN was forgotten.

[Don Pedro Dinero]

Lesson; Always back up your seed phrase, password, recovery phrases, private keys that has access to your Bitcoins and wallets.

Well, there would be several things to qualify here. Firstly, if your bitcoin holdings become important, consider having them in several HWs or the system you use, as well as considering multisig or other systems for each HW. The other would be, as the fiat price rises, cashing out and buying things that you can't lose just like that, tangible assets for example, such as real estate, land, even gold, which is much worse than bitcoin but is a way to diversify and protect yourself against real boating accidents.

[Assface16678]

Well, I think right now they regret it so much, but it's not their fault because they never knew bitcoin would increase in price so much. But think of it: the amount of bitcoin they have, it's a lot of bitcoin. We can say this bitcoin will be classified as "lost bitcoins." There is an article about How Much Bitcoin Is Lost Forever and How Did It Get Lost?  According to Cane Island investment manager Timothy Peterson, around six million BTC have been lost, a substantial chunk of Bitcoin's 21 million supply. which is a lot, and it tackles in the article what is the common reason why there is lost bitcoin, and as the situation happens between the two people mentioned on the topic, their case is the common reason. So imagine you are also one of them who lost a lot of potential fortunes. I guess you will also regret it for life. Anyway, what has been done is done; all they can do is regret it and hope they can still retrieve it, which is little to no longer possible.

[FinneysTrueVision]

The seconds story is pretty insane. He wants to use AI and robot dogs and is being backed by hedge fund investors. I can see why his city council would be reluctant to accept his proposal. If I was a landfill worker I would probably be upset about having my work disrupted by a guy hoping to get rich quick. I can understand his desperation but he isn't entitled to any help that would massively inconvenience many peoples lives in order to correct his mistake.

[yhiaali3]

As for me, the lesson I learned: You have to own your own landfill!!!
I was most affected by the last story. When I heard the story for the first time, I could not believe that all this great wealth was thrown into a landfill and the man was unable to convince the municipality to recover it!!!

Sad stories indeed. All these large amounts of Bitcoin have been forgotten. I do not expect their owners to ever be able to recover them. Totally unfortunate.

I am surprised that most of these are professionals and not beginners. I do not know how they committed these simple (fatal) mistakes. Two of them lost their passwords and the last one threw the hard drive in the garbage!!!

We have a popular proverb that says: “A smart man’s mistake is worth a thousand.”