Stefan, Ripple's former CTO, can't access a hardware wallet with 7,002 BTC worth $244 million because he's nearly out of password attempts. A recovery firm claims it could crack it through brute force, but the effort would take an enormous amount of computing power. The story shows how easily crypto holders can lock themselves out of their own money.
This is absolutely insane. The former Ripple CTO has been locked out of $244 million of Bitcoin on his hard drive because he forgot the password. So he has this IronKey hard drive wallet with 7,002 Bitcoins on it, and it only had 2 attempts at guessing the password remaining. So basically, this unciphered company is willing to help him crack this and they were able to access the data on a similar IronKey hard drive after 200 trillion tries. They said that they're prepared that if Stefan, who's the former Ripple CTO, doesn't want to work with us, they're prepared for him to say no. But they're hopeful because they'd probably get a big bag if they helped him crack this code. This is why crypto is not for everyone, bro. If you forget your password or your seed phrase or you lose it, you're out of here.
