Bitcoin is Inspiring People to do Crazy, Paranoid Things

BY MARCUS GILMER

As the value of cryptocurrency continues to skyrocket, so, too, does the number of crazy things people will do to protect or retrieve their sweet, sweet digital nest egg.

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Most notable are the Winklevoss Twins, that hard-luck pair of entrepreneurs who famously wound up on the outside of Facebook. They’ve gained a redemption story, though, with their new-found bitcoin fortune.

Way back in 2012, the twins used some of the money from their settlement with Facebook to invest in bitcoin when it was around $9 per bitcoin. Fast forward to today and they are billionaires as they — and everyone else — wait for that bubble to burst.

But of course their narrative comes with a strange twist. In a New York Times profile published on Tuesday, it was detailed how far the Winklevi have gone in their pursuit to protect that swelling crypto-fortune.

According to the story, the twins have taken the private keys necessary to access each bitcoin, cut them into pieces, and stashed the pieces in safe deposit boxes at banks all over the country, making it virtually impossible for thieves to ever get a complete private key that would enable them to access the fortune.

Given all the recent hacks and thievery, safety is paramount if you want to protect that fortune. But this takes things to a new level of elaborative protection.

And this method is sane compared to other things people have done in connection with crypto-currency.

The Wall Street Journal has a story about the crazy lengths people will go to access those keys so that they can, in turn, access their bitcoin. As the Journal notes, there’s no “forgot password” link in this case; forget the key, say goodbye to the bitcoin.

One person the Journal talked to keeps his keys and recovery words in a pair of steel boxes, one of which is stored “several states away” for security purposes. In another instance, one man is currently digging through a landfill to find an old hard drive with his keys on it so he can access his stash worth tens of millions.

This kind of tale is becoming so familiar, it’s broken in to the pop culture stream via The Big Bang Theory.

And then there’s this story of Philip Neumeier whose bitcoin stash is worth close to $300,000 but, alas, he doesn’t remember the password so he’s built his own supercomputer to figure it out for him.

The five foot-tall computer system is working so hard that it sits in a 270 gallon tank in special mineral water to disperse the heat it generates. Still, Mr. Neumeier figures it could take a couple hundred years to run through all the possible combinations of letters, numbers and symbols.

“I should probably be about 332 years old by then—hopefully bitcoin will be worth something,” he says.

It’s no wonder that one hypnotist the Journal talked to is offering his services to those who find themselves in need of help remembering their keys or where they placed them. Of course, his fee is a bitcoin.

But what can you expect from a currency developed by a completely anonymous person (people? robots? aliens?), Satoshi Nakamoto, who could become the world’s first-ever trillionaire?

Still, there’s a lot of money to be made, for the time being, as long as you can remember where you put those passwords.

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