Wallet hunters lost millions of dollars in Bitcoin
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| Wallet hunters lost millions of dollars in Bitcoin |
We previously talked about private and public keys and addresses and how we can create them. We also knew that we could share the address or the public key with anyone as he/she could use that address to send us Bitcoin or cryptocurrency. As for the private key, it is a secret and can never be known to anyone but you, otherwise they may withdraw your crypto-currency balances, just as if you gave your credit card and PIN to a passing person you met on the street. We also explained that if the private key is lost or forgotten, all the currencies stored on it are lost forever as there is no specific party that you can turn to to request your wallet's private key. Contrary to the PIN number, for example, if you forgot/lost it, you can go to the bank and extract another new number. So, in mid-2018, according to the Wall Street Journal, Chainalysis, an American company specializing in blockchain analysis, conducted a study in which it revealed the amount of lost bitcoin, as it reached 20% of all bitcoins in existence at the time due to individuals losing the private key that we aforementioned. Most of the 20% of those currencies are considered lost forever, a small percentage of that amount is being tried to be restored by their own owners.
1- So why is this big percentage all missing? How much is it now?
2- What is the terminus of this wealth? Is there anybody looking for it?
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| Wallet hunters lost millions of dollars in Bitcoin |
In the early 2010s, when the value of one bitcoin was less than $1, people were not vastly interested in this private key because the value of the currency was not much to count on. The whole issue was just a new trendy hobby. Later after that, lots of people tried by leaps and bounds to figure out what their private key was. Some of them were lost forever, which constitutes about one-fifth of the entire number of bitcoins in existence, as said.
Well, at the time of this talk, how many Bitcoins are there in the world right now?
In other words, how many bitcoins are there starting with the first 50 unspendable bitcoins in the formation block, which we previously mentioned wherein we were talking about the formation block?
So, how many bitcoins are there in the world now?
There are about 19 million bitcoins. One-fifth of this number is 3.8 million bitcoins, their owners lost their private key and thus lost this huge wealth. Do you know how much that One-fifth equals at the time [During the second half of the current year 2023]?
It is the highest price that bitcoin has ever reached, which is 47 thousand dollars. This means that 3.8 million missing bitcoins, which are one-fifth of the total number of bitcoins, are worth more than 178 billion dollars. That's the value of bitcoins whose private keys are somewhere on this planet but lost. Imagine someone who wrote his private key on a piece of paper that was scattered or lost in a certain place amid tons of books for example. Or it may be located on a lost USB flash drive. It may be located inside a damaged hard disk thrown somewhere and no one knows the treasure it contains
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| Wallet hunters lost millions of dollars in Bitcoin |
An important question popped up here:
Is there any hope that these people will be able to get their private keys back?
The answer
is yes, there is hope, if they know a piece/part of the code used in these keys; there is a possibility that they will be able to figure out the unknown part.
That is why a category called wallet hunters appeared:
Their job is to try to help investors or people recover the lost Bitcoin by trying to retrieve their private keys. These wallet hunters charge fees ranging from 5 to 20% of the bitcoin that they can redeem. However, these are just attempts.
Well, what are those wallet hunters doing?
They use different tools that help them in their investigation. Starting with traditional investigation methods to access the devices on which the private key might be stored, passing through the testing of a set of different keys [if the owner of the bitcoins remembers even a part of the private key for example], up to the best guess of this private key which is tested by what is so-called Brute-force attack or a blind force attack or brute force which is an attack that uses supercomputers to test a large number of private keys until they reach the correct one of the investor. Of course, if the owner of this Bitcoin cannot remember anything of that private key code, the possibility of accessing it will be very weak. but if they remember albeit a part of the code, the probability of recovering the key increases significantly. Sometimes it even comes to using hypnosis, there is a type of wallet hunter called a Crypto Hypnotist and their job is to hypnotize the person who lost his/her private key in an attempt to access the code or even part of it. Despite that, there is an amount of coins that have been retrieved but it is negligible compared to the amount lost so far, so you must resolutely keep your private key and memorize it through and through.
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| Wallet hunters lost millions of dollars in Bitcoin |
