Miracle Recovery: How One Man Restored His Lost Bitcoin Wallet and What It Means for Crypto Investors
Security researchers have successfully cracked the password to recover over $3 million worth of Bitcoin that had been trapped in a crypto wallet for 11 years.
The wallet, which had been locked away since 2013, was inaccessible due to a forgotten password.
The owner hired electrical engineer Joe Grand, also known as ‘Kingpin,’ to hack into the encrypted file and recover his 43.6 BTC.
The recovery not only signifies a personal victory but also provides hope and insights for the broader cryptocurrency community, where lost and inaccessible wallets are a common challenge.
The lost password was generated by a random password generator called RoboForm.
It was a complex combination of 20 upper and lower case letters, along with numbers, designed to be exceedingly difficult to crack.
The wallet’s owner, who preferred to remain anonymous, explained in a video published by Grand that he had generated the password, copied it, and used it as the passphrase for the wallet.
He also encrypted it in a separate text file.
Unfortunately, the encrypted part of the owner’s computer that stored the password became corrupted, leading to its loss.
At the time, the Bitcoin was worth only a few thousand euros, which the owner described as “painful but OK.”
Over the next decade, the lost Bitcoin grew exponentially in value as the price of bitcoin surged by over 20,000 percent.
Faced with the newfound fortune, the owner reached out to Mr. Grand for help in recovering the funds.
Initially hesitant, Grand eventually agreed to take up the challenge and devised a novel method to hack the initial password generator.
Using a reverse engineering tool developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA), Grand disassembled the code of the password generator.
He
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