29.03.2024

At least 2.45 percent of all lost bitcoins can be recovered

Roughly 40 percent of the 1,000 cryptocurrency holders who took part in a recent Cryptovantage survey have previously lost their passwords and other secret wallet combinations. This resulted in an average loss of $ 2,134 on forgotten cryptocurrency addresses.

At the same time, the scale of the loss of digital assets around the world is much greater. Fortunately, «lost coins» can still be recovered – and that is what Chris and Charlie Brooks of Crypto Asset Recovery are doing. According to their calculations, from 68 110 to 92 855 BTC out of the total amount of lost bitcoins can be recovered by various methods. Let’s talk about the situation in more detail.

Note that the topic of lost digital assets is not new. Since in the early years of existence, bitcoins were quite cheap, many investors did not care about their safety. This ended not only with forgotten passwords from storage services, but also locked zip files with the corresponding keys. And they were also opened in due time.

Also, keys on storage media have already been thrown into landfills. A similar thing happened to James Howells, who back in 2013 threw into the trash a hard drive containing a combination for accessing a cryptocurrency address. The early investor is still hoping to get his 7,500 bitcoins and is even willing to share part of the reward with the authorities if they support the initiative. However, so far this story has not ended with anything.

How to get back lost cryptocurrency?

A father and son founded their company to work with lost digital assets relatively recently, but already have a large flow of clients. Here’s a quote from their recent interview posted on Market Insider.

We have a client who was an early Bitcoin miner. He lost the necessary information to access his wallets, but wants to recover passwords. There are also those who purchased their first coins during the 2017 hype and are now looking for ways to remember their crypto addresses.

Sometimes buying cryptocurrencies early does not guarantee earning. For example, one holder of 1,400 bitcoins purchased in 2017 lost them at one point. The fact is that the investor installed a fake version of a well-known cryptocurrency wallet, which was vulnerable to hackers. As a result, the entire amount went to the scammers.

Chris and Charlie Brooks, founders of Crypto Asset Recovery

The Brooks have their first successes: they recently managed to «hack» a wallet with 250 thousand dollars of their client in the account. Cybersecurity experts note that in their business they use not only technical approaches, but also individual methods. Their initiative to find lost bitcoins goes back to 2011 – it was then on the BitcoinTalk forum that the Brooks began to collect information about known lost coins.

In their opinion, with this approach, it is possible to significantly reduce the volume of cryptocurrency withdrawn from circulation. Of the total number of replies on the forum, about 14 percent were very encouraging cases with a high probability of regaining access to the wallet. Through further calculations, it was determined that about 2.45 percent of all lost BTC in the world are recoverable.

We get as accurate a list of potential passwords from the client as possible, and then extrapolate how they create their passwords and try to come up with the exact combination.

That is, in fact, the guys are engaged in creative work. Naturally, given the difficulty of the topic, the possibility of recovery is not guaranteed in any way.

For their work, father and son receive a commission of 20 percent of the funds in the wallet. If the hack fails, customer service is free. Their initiative is very commendable, as many early crypto investors sometimes lose a fortune by mistake. However, most BTC, unfortunately, cannot be withdrawn from long-forgotten wallets.

We believe that the idea of ​​a father and son will definitely help Bitcoin investors who have lost access to their coins. Still, people rarely change passwords for various services, and if they do, they make them similar to each other. Therefore, there is still a chance of success. And it’s clearly worth a try.

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