According to the Chainalysis data, it is estimated that owners cannot access $140 billion worth of bitcoin holdings because their owners have forgotten their passwords.
The figure represents roughly 20% of the 18.5 billion existing BTC. To some extent, the coin’s owners can’t get hold of holdings that are worth millions of dollars.
Bitcoin Nature Locks People Out of Their Wallet
Cryptocurrency lovers praise bitcoin’s decentralization; however, imperfect methods of securing digital tokens have pulled millions of bitcoins out of circulation with little hope of recovery.
Bitcoin owners store the private keys needed to issue or move tokens. These keys exist as complex records and are often held in secure digital wallets.
The wallets are usually protected by a password or authentication action. Although its complexity allows owners to store their assets more securely, losing keys or passwords can damage your investment.
It is a puzzling development as bitcoin holders often appear to be tech savvies and financially visionary. In their defense, accessing a “digital wallet” containing BTC holdings is a bit more complicated than accessing your bank’s account where there is no setting to remind you of your password or reset it.
However, given that cryptocurrencies (or speculative investment vehicles) are in a highly volatile array, there has been a lot of interest lately to solve this problem.
Hope For the Lost Passwords
Several platforms have come up with a way to recover the lost passwords and are capitalizing on it. Among them is BTC Recover.
BTC Recover is an open source wallet password & seed recovery tool that assists in trying different combinations for passwords. It not only supports Bitcoin but also Ethereum, among other 8 cryptocurrencies.
The platform also has seed recovery functions. It uses the token list functionality to generate a password for creating an opening phrase. This feature can be utilized to parse initial phrases where the space words are available but the order is unknown. Currently, it is only practical with 12 seed words, although that also applies to 24 word seeds where the location of the 12 words is known.
There are many scam recovery services out there and it can be very difficult to tell a legitimate business apart from a fraudulent one. 9 out of 10 recovery companies defraud customers luring their victims with a fraudulent process while they never recover the money stolen by the fraudsters.
It is worth noting that BTC Recover is licensed, bonded, and insured hence you do not have to worry about its legitimacy.