The great thing about BTC is that it can be anonymously owned and securely transferred. But, if you work illegally, you get caught! The German authorities have a digital wallet, with more than €50 million ($60 million) worth of Bitcoin in it. But they have an equally serious problem: they do not know the password!
The case is of particular interest, as the “digital hacker”, who was jailed for illegally using computers to mine Bitcoins, served his sentence without revealing the password to the authorities. Thus, it did not give them access to the approximately 1,700 Bitcoins stored there.
It should be noted that when the digital hacker was jailed, the value of Bitcoin was much lower than it is today, with the digital currency setting a record high of more than $42,000 at the beginning of the year.
“We asked him but he did not tell us”, Sebastian Moorer, a prosecutor in the Bavarian city of Kebten, told Reuters. “Maybe he doesn’t know either”.
Thus, there is the following paradox: the authorities possess the digital wallet, but not the code for it, while the man who was convicted and served his sentence, is forbidden to have access to the digital wallet.
It is noted that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are stored in encrypted “digital wallets” that require the use of a password to be unlocked.
Account encryption is an important element of security, but sometimes it creates problems: Billions of euros worth of Bitcoin is estimated to be stored in digital wallets that the passwords have been forgotten or are inaccessible to its owners.
