Stefan was paid 7,000 Bitcoin in 2011 to make a video. He lost the password to his hardware wallet and had only two guesses left before it locked him out forever. A team offered to bypass the limit, but Stefan refused because he'd already made handshake deals with two other groups trying to recover it.
This guy, Stefan, in 2011, he gets paid to make a video about Bitcoin. 7,000 Bitcoin to do it. At the time, it's like $10 grand. So that same 7,000 Bitcoin is today worth 400 million Bitcoin. He couldn't sell. He lost the password to his Bitcoin because he writes the password down to his IronKey on a piece of paper, puts it somewhere safe. Problem is he forgets about it. He tries to guess. Guesses once, guesses twice. Problem is IronKey has a limit. You only get 10 guesses. So now he's got 2 guesses left. There's this team. They weren't able to figure out how to actually like just pick the lock. So they're like, can we get rid of this 10 password limit? If we can get rid of the 10-guess limit, we can guess an infinite number of times. And these guys actually have done it. No way. Oh, here's the problem. Stefan doesn't want to work with them. Why? He goes, I made a handshake deal with 2 other groups to try to crack this, and I want to honor that. It's 7,000— that's $700 million. Now it is, yeah. There should be enough to go around, right, where you could have like 3 parties to work on this? There should be more than enough.
