💸 Estonian billionaire locked out of $1B in Ethereum
The story of Rein Lõhmus sounds like a warning to anyone who ever put off writing down a password: “Don’t postpone security until tomorrow.”
The co-founder of one of Estonia’s largest private banks, LHV Bank, invested $75,000 in Ethereum during its 2015 ICO, when ETH was priced at just $0.30. Today, that forgotten wallet is worth around $1.16 billion (at ETH $4600). But here’s the catch: Lõhmus no longer has access to it.
“I was one of the early Ethereum investors, but back then almost nobody thought about security. Hardware wallets barely existed, and storing private keys wasn’t a priority,” he admitted.
The keys are lost – permanently. As Ethereum’s creator Vitalik Buterin has often said: “Crypto gives you freedom, but with it comes responsibility.”
Lõhmus has even offered to reward anyone who could help him unlock the wallet.
Yet experts believe the task is impossible: the cryptographic protection is so strong that hacking attempts are pure science fiction.
Crypto history is full of such tragicomic stories.
For instance, British investor James Howells lost a hard drive containing keys to 7,500 BTC (worth about $900M today). In 2013, his girlfriend accidentally threw it away, and since then he has fought (unsuccessfully) to dig up a landfill in Newport where he believes the drive lies buried.
Howells doesn’t give up. He even offered investors multimillion-dollar shares of the potential discovery just to get access to the landfill. But for now, the story remains one of the most expensive mistakes in the history of cryptocurrencies.
Another famous case is Stefan Thomas, a San Francisco programmer who lost access to 7,000 BTC after forgetting the password to his IronKey. According to Chainalysis, up to 20% of all Bitcoin in existence may be permanently lost due to forgotten passwords or misplaced storage devices.
📌 Takeaway: Cryptocurrency makes you your own bank – but that also means you alone are responsible for your vault. As the crypto community jokes:
“Not your keys – not your coins. And if you lost your keys – still not your coins.”
Here, by the way, you can buy legendary hardware wallets for beginners with all the essential features!
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