Crypto Startup Bankrupt After Losing Password to $38.9M Crypto Wallet

Boating accident, huh?

I’m reminded of the dotcom bubble when companies would proudly show off their “we’re in the big boy club” server rooms with millions of dollars in Cisco and Sun hardware, Oracle and BEA licenses, etc. and hope you wouldn’t notice that they had three customers and no sysadmins. Around the time you’re paying someone to metal etch your encryption keys, anyone with a shred of ethics should be asking whether that’s anything but marketing to the gullible – or a sign that your underlying technology isn’t a good choice.

This is a solved problem in crypto and having even a billion in a single wallet is fine. That’s why multi-sig were created, it’s used more as a redundancy mechanism than a voting one.

wow. I've made a ton of mistakes but this is exquisite.

I rarely lost any object in my life. The state of being lost is not easy to reach because it means the object cannot be found anywhere you went; I sometimes have to search for an object that I think I lost in my own home, most of the time when the object cannot be found it is the case that someone else is involved : the persons you share your house with would then, after a phone call, tell you they took your keys this morning by inadvertence or whatever.

Most of the time when the object cannot be found it begins to sound like if the rules of reality did change and I am really amazed by the fact that I'm inclined to retry things that were unsuccessful in the finding of the object, like opening a drawer for the third time, or searching the same pocket of my bag, just to check I didn't miss anything. I sometimes tell to myself, out loud, "That's impossible, I searched everywhere !". And that's right, that's totally impossible.

I'm a believer that lost generally equals stolen (or taken away by mistake, or hidden in a really weird place like when people put their home keys under a stone in their garden so that they have a way to enter in case they lose another set of key).

From my own humble experience (not trying to prove anything), the only times where the object wasn't taken away by mistake, were the time the object in question was in such an obvious place that I didn't find it. For example, I'm pretty sure it happened to you at least once to search for or to see someone searching for a hat/cap that they/you were already wearing on their/your head.

One other possibility would be to destruct the object, or to throw it somewhere, letting the randomness of diverse events act toward the disappearance of it. This is when you truly lost something. Truly lost means that you cannot find it anymore, due to the fact it's buried deep in the ocean or it has fallen into a volcano.

In every other meaning of the word, the reasons the object cannot be found is due to a the actions of a peer or is due to inattention.

It seems weird to think one could possibly bring such a precious object in a place where it would be truly lost. I believe the object is already found or will be found by someone: stolen, consciously or not.