![]() You can store the key codes that let your send and receive cryptocurrency on a text file on a drive, or even by writing them down in a “paper wallet” in a drawer. They also have long, onerous ways of bypassing that security - random 25-word security phrases - if you bother to set it up. It’s a feature available on many modern crypto hardware wallets. Thomas has tried eight times at last look. ![]() What happened? The short version is that Thomas stored his 7,002 bitcoins on an encrypted flash drive called an Iron Key, which protects your data from thieves by destroying itself after 10 failed password attempts. This was in 2011 when BTC briefly soared as high as $30 before ending the year at $4.25 - up more than 1,317%. Thomas is a programmer who was given 7,002 bitcoins by a client as a bonus for making an animated video, according to the New York Times, BBC News and about 16.6 million other sources if Google is to be believed. There are many hard-luck stories in crypto, but few are as hard as Stefan Thomas and the $266 million digital wallet he cannot open. See also: PYMNTS Crypto Basics Series: What’s a Consensus Mechanism and Why Is It Destroying the Planet? See also: PYMNTS Crypto Basics Series: What’s a Blockchain and How Does It Work? What we are not going to do is talk about regulation, finance or investing - you’ll find that elsewhere on. Over the course of this series of articles, we’ll be delving into the basics of the industry, providing an introduction to crypto that will give you a solid grounding in the technology and a lexicon for its terminology - cryptographers should never be allowed to name anything the public will eventually need to know - in short, enough to understand what people are talking about and decide if you want to dive in. Bitcoin, blockchain and cryptocurrency are words that most people have at least heard of in 2022, as the industry exploded into the mainstream public consciousness.
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