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Thomas lost the page on which he kept his wallet passwords about a decade ago and in January he had only two guesses out of ten left to try to open the drive, before it was locked forever. "I lie in bed and think about it, go to the computer with some new strategy, it doesn't work and I get desperate again," Thomas said.

"It's very easy to lose your bitcoin"

Still, according to Chainalysis, a company that analyzes information in the field of virtual currencies, about 20% of the Bitcoin currencies currently on the market, worth a total of about $ 125 billion, are considered "lost."

So what do you do if you forget your wallet passwords? A common backup solution is a sequence of usually 12 to 24 words, which merchants keep on physical paper and allow access to coins. At the same time, it is very easy to lose your bitcoin. All you have to do is lose your private key and thus lose access to coins. If you do not put your keys in a security service and you forget the password or the app is deleted and you did not back it up, you lost the money. Could it happen today as well, or did it happen mostly to merchants who bought in the beginning? Sure, these things can happen and that's a part that comes built-in from how Bitcoin is built - you're responsible for your money. Some people forget their password and backup words and that's why there's an advantage in keeping your money with a third party.

There are solutions

"Whoever does not want to be responsible for his money - there are solutions. It is as if it goes against the Bitcoin agenda, but the Bitcoin agenda is also not to lose your money."

Even when we choose a security service, the keys are still somewhere and theoretically, it can be hacked or the company may lose access to the keys. However, when choosing a reputable devoted company, the chances of such a thing happening are very low. And what is the impact of "lost" Bitcoin on all market traders? Theoretically, if a large security company now issues a press release and says it has lost all its keys, then in the short run the market will crash but in the medium to long term, the value of currencies should go up because supply has dropped dramatically and demand remains. Is it possible to recover lost keys?

What is the chance of restoring access to the lost money?

One common description is that to find a single private key, it's more or less like encircling the entire United States with a wall a few feet high, filling everything with corn kernels and looking inside for a specific grain. That is, very unlikely, certainly not on the scale of all the "lost" currencies. After all, if it were not so, and it was possible to grill keys until you find the right one - there would be no value to the coin itself.

by J. Almond, CEO weKeep!^®
A great idea is using password vaults like weKeep!®, primarily because they enable greater security. Using a password vault, you can easily use longer, more secure passwords, and easily use different passwords for every site. These two actions together increase your overall online security tremendously. If there’s a downside to using a password vault it’s that, used properly, you don’t know your own passwords. This is a good thing, since strong passwords are, essentially, unknowable. But it’s also a bad thing, in that should you lose access to your password vault, you lose access to all the information stored therein.

Because passwords are tedious, humans are very bad at them. “There are literally billions of passwords breached every year,” says Gerald Beuchelt of the password manager LastPass. “It’s a total epidemic. It’s happening on a daily basis.” A Google/Harris poll from 2019 found that 52% of people reuse their passwords across multiple accounts, which is very bad security practice.

According to research published by the Garner Group in 2017, 20-50% of all IT helpdesk calls are for password resets. “It’s the biggest overhead on IT helpdesks,” says Siân John, a cybersecurity strategist at Microsoft. “It’s usually in the first week of January, or after the summer holidays – people go on holidays, come back and forget their passwords.”

We would not leave the door to our house open and yet many of us leave our digital accounts vulnerable to cybercriminals every day, because of our laissez-faire attitude to password security. Sometimes, criminals access accounts using personal information a person has shared online, or matching passwords from previous data breaches but, increasingly, hackers also use brute-force software – programmes which match thousands of dictionary words until something fits. “You can brute force most eight character passwords within 10 minutes,” says Gerald Beuchelt of the password manager LastPass.

Most of us have been involved in a data breach at some point, whether it was the big breach at British Airways in 2018 or the more recent Facebook breach. It's a concerning fact of modern life that most of us at some point in our online lives will see our details caught up in a hack.

The best known site for checking if your email address, or any account associated with it, has been hacked, is called Have I Been Pwned. Here, you can enter your email address (safely) and the site will check it against multiple data breach records. If your account details were included in one of those breaches, you'll be told the bad news that you've been 'pwned'.