David Schwartz, current Chief Technical Officer at Ripple, recently responded to reports that his predecessor Stefan Thomas lost access to hundreds of millions of dollars in Bitcoin.
In a Quora post on Thursday, Schwartz said recent reports of his predecessor at Ripple who forgot the password to an encrypted hard drive containing thousands of Italian Formula were true.
But he added that Thomas also lost access to hundreds of BTC when the crypto asset was „young“
The Ripple CTO said his predecessor tested the development of a Javascript library for Bitcoin by using real BTC. However, that was at a time when the Bitcoin price was well below a dollar.
He would create unused expenses with ‚1.0‘ Bitcoin because that was the fastest and easiest number to type. He probably created hundreds of such accounts that he didn’t keep the keys of because they were just for quick experiments. Each of these accounts is worth about $ 38,000 today.
The existence of a few hundred such accounts with 1 BTC each would mean that the accumulated amount of these accounts is now also worth more than $ 3 million.
Thomas could lose his access to 7,002 BTC forever
Last week, a profile in the New York Times reported on Thomas that the German-born programmer used eight out of ten attempts to guess the password to access an encrypted hard drive at 7,002 BTC. He only has two tries to guess the IronKey hard drive. Should he also use this unsuccessfully, the data and thus the money would be lost forever.
Schwartz confirmed the story on Quora, saying that Thomas had put aside the BTC that were part of a payment for making a video. However, he questioned the number of over $ 200 million often cited by news agencies:
I believe today [Thomas Bitcoin Supply] is worth about $ 114 million. I’m not sure where the $ 240 million figure is coming from – maybe I am remembering wrong.