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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: marcher who wrote (167011)1/12/2021 8:51:45 PM
From: Julius Wong  Respond to of 217894
 
CEF is physical gold and silver.

The old CEF was taxed like stocks.



To: marcher who wrote (167011)1/13/2021 5:04:15 AM
From: TobagoJack1 Recommendation

Recommended By
marcher

  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 217894
 
for those, including me, who enjoys and empathises pressure, and eat ambiguity for breakfast, below story a good one ...

Subject: (GUA) Programmer has two guesses left to access £175m bitcoin wa



(GUA) Programmer has two guesses left to access £175m bitcoin wallet

Programmer has two guesses left to access £175m bitcoin wallet
2021-01-13 01:07:22.29 GMT

Programmer has two guesses left to access £175m bitcoin wallet

Rupert Neate Wealth correspondent

(Guardian) -- Stefan Thomas has just two chances left to get his hands on his
$240m (£175m) fortune.

Thomas is a San Francisco-based computer programmer, and a decade ago he was
given 7,002 bitcoins as a reward for making a video explaining how the
cryptocurrency works.

At the time he was paid, they were worth $2-$6 each. He stashed them away in
his “digital wallet” and forgot about them.

Now each bitcoin is worth $34,000, and the contents of his wallet are valued
at $240m. But Thomas has forgotten the password that will unlock his fortune.

German-born Thomas has already entered the wrong password eight times, and if
he guesses wrong two more times his hard drive, which contains his private
keys to the bitcoin, will be encrypted – and he’ll never see the money.

The price of bitcoin hit more than $40,000 last week, having doubled in less
than a month. It has since fallen back but it is still up by more than 700%
since the pandemic was first declared in March last year, rising from about
$5,000.

Thomas said he has tried his eight most frequently used passwords to access
his IronKey hard drive, but all turned out to be wrong. The device
auto-encrypts all contents after the 10th inaccurate guess.

“I would just lay in bed and think about it,” Thomas told the New York Times.
“Then I would go to the computer with some new strategy, and it wouldn’t work,
and I would be desperate again.”

Thomas said the experience has understandably put him off cryptocurrencies.
“This whole idea of being your own bank – let me put it this way, do you make
your own shoes?” he said. “The reason we have banks is that we don’t want to
deal with all those things that banks do.”

Following the publicity of Thomas’s plight, Alex Stamos, an internet security
expert at Stanford Internet Observatory, said he could crack the password
within six months if Thomas gave him a 10% cut of the digital fortune.

“Um, for $220m in locked-up bitcoin, you don’t make 10 password guesses but
take it to professionals to buy 20 IronKeys and spend six months finding a
side-channel or uncapping,” he said on Twitter. “I’ll make it happen for 10%.
Call me.”

Cryptocurrency data firm Chainalysis said it estimated that about 20% of the
existing 18.5m bitcoins appears to be lost or stranded in inaccessible
wallets.

In 2013, Welsh IT worker James Howells accidentally threw out a hard drive
containing the keys to 7,500 bitcoins. At the time, the lost bitcoins were
worth about £4m. Now, they would be worth more than $250m.

Click here to see the story as it appeared on the Guardian website

-0- Jan/13/2021 01:07 GMT