The treasure hunt is on – There is no shortage of stories of bitcoins lost forever on an old hard drive, or due to the loss of private keys to access the wallet . On the other hand, this time, it is about a huge sum which is blocked: not less than 69,000 BTC! What to attract greed …

In pursuit of the lost password

On the Darknet side, a Bitcoin wallet (BTC) is the subject of the attention of many curious and hackers. The wallet is associated with the public address „1HQ3Go3ggs8pFnXuHVHRytPCq5fGG8Hbhx“.

The latter indeed contains a little more than 69,000 bitcoins , or about $ 730 million at the time of writing. But obviously his access password has been forgotten / lost.

The Twitter account @UnderTheBreach explains this wallet :

„(…) has been circulating for two years between hackers / crackers in order to crack the password, without success so far“ .

A treasure lost forever? Maybe not…

If the pros of the brute force attack – which consists of trying as many password combinations as possible – have broken their teeth for two years to break into this wallet , chances are that these bitcoins will remain technically inaccessible for. a long moment. Or at least not until a fully functioning quantum computer has been developed!

But after all, who knows … Last April, we reported the case of a Russian internet user who found himself in this situation. He had called on a former engineer from Google. In a few months of bitter struggle – and 100,000 dollars of investment -, the latter had ended up cracking the password to access the wallet , with 300,000 dollars of bitcoins at stake .

So who will rise to the challenge for these 69,000 BTC? Knowing that it might take years, without any assurance of getting there, it seems like a risky bet. Unless the value of Bitcoin continues to rise. For example, if BTC were to increase tenfold again, more might be interested in a $ 7 billion treasure!