Although Bitcoin has fallen back many times recently, it can be revived every night. The number of people who sell at low prices increases. However, there are more people who buy the bottom. Bitcoin is now more important to the public. It's like a new type of asset with no cap on value.
At the same time that the price is soaring, some former Bitcoin enthusiasts have caused the loss of Bitcoin due to forgotten passwords or other reasons.
The most typical case is that Ripple's former CTO Stefan Thomas (Stefan Thomas), who has recently made a lot of noise, forgot his encrypted hard drive password and caused 7002 Bitcoins to be dusted. If calculated at the price of 35,000 US dollars per piece, These bitcoins are worth 245 million U.S. dollars (approximately 1.588 billion RMB).
The main reason is that he kept the private key in an encrypted hard drive, and there is no other backup. Just when he wanted to open the hard disk and take out the private key to become a billionaire, he forgot his hard disk password. He had failed 8 times in total of 10 attempts, and there was almost no possibility of recovering it.
However, even more desperate is that, according to the current CTO David Schwartz, Stefan Thomas created hundreds of "unspent balance" (UTXO) accounts with 1 BTC per account when developing a Javascript library for Bitcoin. He did not keep his private key. The price was only less than $1 at the time, which means that the total number of lost bitcoins now amounts to 7,102.
An example of this is James Howells, who mistakenly used the hard drive with 7,500 bitcoins as a broken empty hard drive and threw it away. At that time, there were two hard drives in his drawer, one is a bad empty hard drive and the other is for private storage Key hard drive. Without careful inspection, he threw away the hard drive holding the private key. Recently, James Howells has put forward a new request, hoping to obtain the right to dig a landfill in Newport City, and use 25% of Bitcoin as a donation to fight the new crown pneumonia. At the same time, James Howells also stated that he is ready to transfer funds to a custodial account to pay for mining costs.
There are countless examples like this, and there are still many small amounts that can only be borne by oneself. Compared with problems such as stolen accounts, phishing links, and low-price selling, the pain index of forgetting the password is the highest among them. Therefore, we are constantly questioning the security brought by encryption algorithms. The asymmetric encryption mechanism adopted by the blockchain uses a "key pair" in which a public key and a private key appear in pairs, and the sender uses the public key for encryption , The receiver uses the paired private key to decrypt and sign, and the two parties do not need to disclose their identities to gain the trust of the other party. However, due to the decentralized issuance of encrypted digital currency in reality, the entire system uses the private key to identify the individual's identity. Only the account owner knows the private key, and the owner needs to enter the code to transfer ownership to another party. The loss or cracking of the private key means the loss of encrypted digital currency, and the security of the asset will no longer exist.
The emergence of this problem has nothing to do with price fluctuations, and this is actually what we need to care about most. The price rises and the funds are gone. This is the fundamental reason that prevents more people from participating.
Although we have the ownership and can control the wallet by ourselves, we still need to be responsible when there is a problem. The behavior on the chain is completed by the contract. In this process of continuous evolution, we need to protect our security through continuous learning . Regarding security, I personally very much hope that related applications can be improved in the future, and I also believe that this is an indispensable part of the advancement of cryptocurrency.