February 11, 2022
Rhonda Kempert was an early adapter.
He bought six bitcoins in 2013 when they cost $ 80 and the bitcoin was talked about in some corner of the internet.
"I used to listen to a radio show where they talked about cryptocurrencies and bitcoin and I got interested in it," she says. Buy coins
Rhonda, who lives in the US state of New York, used some of her digital money the following year and then forgot about it.
When she saw the headlines in 2017 that the bitcoin had reached $13,000, she was overjoyed and decided to sell her bitcoin.
But there was a problem. They did not have their bitcoin wallet login details. A bitcoin wallet is a computer program or device that holds secret numbers or private keys.
"It simply came to our notice then that the paper I had printed did not contain any letters from my wallet ID number. I had my password but I had no idea what my wallet ID was.
"It simply came to our notice then. I kept trying for months and then I got frustrated. That's why I gave up. "
Treasure Hunter: Treasure hunters
Now let's look at last spring when the bitcoin price exceeded $ 50,000. This is 600 times more than the money Rhonda paid 8 years ago.
Once again determined to get his coin, Rhonda tried to find a solution on the Internet, and found a father, son, Chris and Charlie, the treasure hunters of the crypto.
After talking to them for a while, I was convinced that I would give them the information I had," she said. And then I waited. "
Finally we sat down on a video call and saw everything happen. Chris opened the wallet and everyone was there! I was very happy. "
The three-and-a-half bitcoins in Rhonda's vault were now worth about ً 175,000. I gave Chris and Chali 20% of it and then the first thing I did was take out $ 10,000 and give it to my daughter to help with her college expenses," she says.
She says she now locks the rest in a hardware vault. It is a security device that resembles a USB stick and its information is stored offline. The details of their new hardware vault are in their minds.
Rhonda hopes that the value of their coins (each currently valued at about 43,000) will rise again. She says she sees it as her retirement fund and dreams of quitting her job as a stock and corrupt trader.
Loss of billions
Many people in the world today are like Rhonda. At present, 3.7 million of the 18.9 million bitcoins in circulation have been lost, according to China Analytics, a corrupt researcher.
And in the decentralized world of cryptocurrency, there is no administrator, so if you forget your wallet login details, there is no one you can question.
Chris and Charlie estimate that services like these, which use computers to enter thousands of possible logins and passwords, will be able to recover about 2.5 lost bitcoins, valued at about ً 3.9 billion.
Chris started his business in Crypto East Recovery 2017 but then stopped because he was focusing on some other projects. He resumed his work after talking to his son a year ago.
I was on vacation from college, and I was just sitting at home with my dad thinking about business ideas," says Charlie, 20.
We thought of starting this business again and then in a few weeks we would buy some servers and run everything."
When the value of the bitcoin peaked in November 2021, while working in his home workshop in New Hampshire, he began to receive 100 emails and calls a day from potential customers.
Now that it has fallen again, they are working on their old cases.
The business is so successful that Charlie has given up on completing his computer science degree. But both father and son say that most of their time is spent in despair.
Working with incomplete memories of their customers or old pieces of paper, they say they are only about 30% successful.
And with that, when the vault opens, they are often disappointed with what they can find inside.
Most of the time we don't know what's inside the vault, so we have to rely on our customers to find out what's going on inside," says Charlie.
We had a case last year in which a man told us he had 12 bitcoins in his wallet. We maintained a professional temperament in front of them, but in the back we were applauding each other happily, thinking of possible income.
"We spent about 60 hours on our computer. Spend about 10 hours with the customer and then when he can open the vault it comes out empty inside.
Charlie and Chris say that only once did their client underestimate what would come out of it. This turned out to be their biggest search, a bitcoin worth about ً 280,000.
He says he has returned more than $ 1 million worth of bitcoins in the past year.
Hardware hacking
These fathers and sons are part of a growing industry of honest hackers who use their skills to find lost cryptocurrencies.
Just like the grandchildren who started hacking as a teenager. He is best known for his statement to the US Senate in 1998, in which he described weaknesses in the early days of the Internet.
He recently made a YouTube video in which he opened a hardware wallet and gave it to his user, which contained two million dollars in cryptocurrency called Theta.
Joe spent months developing a new method at his workshop in Portland, Oregon, and developing and practicing hacks on other hardware vaults.
Eventually, they found a vulnerability in the hardware vault and combined it with two vulnerabilities already discovered. This indicates that if someone carefully electric shocks the vault at the right time, they can give their PIN code.
"When you break into a crypto wallet, I mean, when you break into any security, it feels like magic, no matter how many times you do it," he says.
"Even though I proved several times in my tests that I could hack this vault, I was worried that day because you never knew what was going to happen and we only had one bullet or the whole thing broke." Can and coins will be lost forever.
"Opening the vault was a huge adrenaline rush. I guess it's like the technical version of treasure hunting. "
Who teach manufacturers how to protect their products from hackers but say they are now receiving many calls from people hoping to recover lost cryptocurrencies.
If someone brings me a big enough wallet and I have enough money to spend my time, we will try," he says.
