Opening up about losing his fortune earlier this year, Thomas said he felt like a “complete idiot” after forgetting the password to his wealth. He said he plans to put his IronKey in a secure facility until a better way is found to crack it.

That means in today’s value, it would be worth £189,905,495.

In the past decade, Thomas has used up eight of his 10 attempts hoping to regain access, but after multiple failed entries, he now has just two chances left – before his investment completely disappears into the abyss.Īnd to make it all worse, his 7,002 investment has sky rocketed by an eye-watering 19,900 per cent since his password went missing. Under the terms of the security lock, if you forget your key, you have 10 attempts to try again, before it locks the digital wallet forever. Theoretically it might be possible to pull data from the chip but it would require a lot of specialised hardware - things like electron microscopes and a lot of time and effort piecing it all together.Man stunned to find £185,000 worth of Bitcoin in his account after payments blunder

The device is designed specifically to prevent exactly what you're describing. The same is said for your credit card (though they'll contain a failsafe that lets your bank unlock it, even that failsafe has a limit). That same computer is tracking the number of failed attempts at accessing it and if it goes above a certain threshold, it will lock - probably by just deleting the encryption key altogether. The data is encrypted, but there's no command to read any of the encryption details, you either supply the correct password and get the data or you get told to try again. When you're reading data off of it, it's not a straight up reading of the memory contents but rather you're sending commands to a tiny computer that can refuse to action those commands. For the same reason you can't just make a copy of your Chipped credit card.

Ironkey digital wallet