Imagine this scenario – you have been into crypto for some time now, you dedicated your time and money to achieve your goals and suddenly for any reason all of that is gone in an instant! What do you do!? It isn’t important if you did this for a few months, days or even a few years nobody wants to see their work go to waste. If you value your time and resources invested in a certain project then you will not let it go to waste without putting up a fight.
You all pretty much know the story about that guy who threw away the hard drive which had 7.500 Bitcoin on it right? Well, this is a story that every miner or Bitcoin collector dreads and tries to stop. James Howells had 7.500 Bitcoin on an old hard drive which he left in a drawer and forgot about. After cleaning or whatever years after he mistakenly threw away that hard drive and lost, what is by today’s prices, around $280 million. This is something that chills the blood in veins of all of us that are working to mine and collect Bitcoin. Imagine losing that much money in such a way! Is there a way to recover your Bitcoin after something like this or even similar happens? Today we will give you the answers!
So far we know that the crypto market has been plagued with cases of theft or fraud, lost coins or private keys and that is a daily occurrence. But what exactly to do if one of these happens to you?
Lost coins
According to some research and analysis of the blockchain, you will find out that there are around 20% of all bitcoins missing. The most common problem that leads to this is users losing their access to the crypto wallets by, mainly, forgetting the seed. Since this is not as simple as you forget your email password, you will have a tough time recovering this mainly because cryptocurrency work in a decentralized ecosystem where there is no one to issue a new key to the original owner. If you didn’t get it this far then let us explain. So far there is no way of getting back your lost wallet key.
The best thing you can do is rummage for wherever you wrote that key to and flip every piece of furniture and clothes until you find it. No one can return it for you and if they say they can – they are lying. We have only one piece of advice for anyone who is opening a new wallet and it is to look for ones that are now implementing something called “zero-knowledge encryption”. It’s a little complicated to explain just how it works, but what you need to know is that there is a possibility to regain access to your wallet if you lose your key or password thanks to this encryption type.
If you don’t believe us that so far there is no way to access your wallet if you lost your key, try googling this and see for yourself. This is such a problematic area that people are even turning to Hypnotherapy to recover what is theirs, as stated by cryptwerk.com. There are hypnotherapist sites that charge 0.5BTC for a session and if they are successful you have to pay an additional 5% for their help in the retrieval. Ridiculous right?!
Scams, hack or thefts
Now here there can be a little more success and its all thanks to something called Crypto Currency hunters. Who are they? Thanks to so much loss of digital currency it was only logical that a new breed of digital entities to rise with their service offering. These hunters will be here for you if you lose or your digital wallet keys get stolen. They work with both cryptocurrency holders and law enforcement agencies to search and recover your lost or stolen assets.
These guys will use everything and anything in their power to fulfil their task. That includes usage of the modern supercomputers that can help them crack your private keys faster, or even resorting to the previous thing we mentioned and it is mental practices like hypnotherapy. They operate by asking you only the basic details that include the last remembered private key and some basic information about you.
There are also some efforts of a few technology enthusiasts that are attempting to make a DIY version of this by making programs which will test tens of millions of password combinations. So far no big breakthroughs here but we hope that someone will take a step forward in the right direction. Since there is more and more need for stuff like this, just imagine the piles of cash for the first one who cracks this app to roll in!
Back to Crypto hunters, as we mentioned above they also deal with crypto thefts and scams, and they do this by tightly cooperating with law enforcement and agencies to identify the transfer point of the stolen coins. Like any other job you should normally expect that these guys will ask for some sort of reimbursement and boy is there one. For a successful retrieval, you will have to pay both an upfront fixed cost plus a percentage for the retrieval after it is successful. They charge in cryptocurrency and the fixed prices aren’t that steep but the percentage of the recovered funds vary from 5-10%.
The conclusion here is to be very careful when dealing with the online hunters, hypnotists and any sort of people dealing in finding you lost keys or cryptocurrencies. Most of it is a hoax pointed to those desperate, but there are honest ones and they are knowledgeable enough to perform a task at hand. You should also do business with hunters that operate in the real world and can verify their identity before sharing any personal information with them, no matter how small or unimportant they are.
The last thing that we have to say should be apparent from the first time you opened your bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency wallet, no matter how menial they seemed at the beginning – Store your passwords, crypto keys and any other important information safely. Always have a few copies, no matter if they are electronic copies or hard copies, make sure you have them safe and sound. If you believe that something is or will be important or of great value sometime later go to your bank and if you don’t already have one, buy a safe deposit box and store your keys whether on USB sticks or written on paper there. That way you will always know where they are and you will be sure that they are safe and guarded.