Ripple’s David Schwartz is sharing his own Bitcoin tale of loss and discovery.
In a new Quora thread, Ripple’s chief technology officer discusses how he misplaced and then recuperated six figures worth of BTC.
About a decade ago when Bitcoin was worth around $20, Schwartz created an account with a crypto casino and deposited 8 BTC to gamble – a stash that is now worth $289,700 at time of publishing.
Because Schwartz did not enjoy the casino, he left the BTC to sit there for about seven years.
When he realized his casino fund had appreciated greatly, despite not having gambled with the funds for seven years, the CTO went back to find his BTC.
At first, the CTO could not remember the name of the casino and spent some time scouring the internet to no avail.
Eventually, however, the name of the casino came to him after waking up one day. He subsequently found an old email connected to the account and went on to initiate the password recovery procedure.
The procedure worked. Schwartz found 7.5 Bitcoin in his account, and was able to successfully withdraw the BTC.
Schwartz shares his story as part of a larger narrative of Bitcoin holders losing and, in some cases, never recovering large troves of BTC.
One individual who is in the midst of trying to recover his BTC trove is Coil CEO Stefan Thomas.
Thomas says he owns a wallet holding 7,002 Bitcoin and has no means of accessing its contents. Currently, Thomas says he has two more tries to unlock his IronKey wallet before it shuts him out forever.
Schwartz says he suspects Thomas has several other accounts worth one Bitcoin each from when the developer was testing his Javascript library for Bitcoin.
Describes Schwartz,
“This was a time when Bitcoin was worth a tiny fraction of a dollar so [Thomas] would create unspent outputs with ‘1.0’ Bitcoin… He likely created hundreds of such accounts, none of which he retained the keys for.”
Each of those accounts, as of writing, would be worth $36,786 today, according to CoinMarketCap.
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