Recently, Live Bitcoin News put out a story discussing how many people have potentially lost their passwords and thus cannot access the mega bitcoin stashes they’ve collected over the years. According to billionaire investor and former hedge fund manager Mike Novogratz, this isn’t likely to occur again anytime soon.
Mike Novogratz: When the Price Is This High, People Won’t Forget
One of the big problems with bitcoin and crypto in general is that it can be easy to lose one’s login information, especially for complicated wallets that require two-factor authentication or multiple devices to gain access to one’s money. In the recently published story, we discussed a man who had a hardware wallet known as Iron Key that permitted ten attempts to enter one’s password. Granted the person failed all those times, the contents would become encrypted and locked up forever.
Right now, there are a little more than 18 million bitcoin units in circulation, though it is estimated that as many as three million may have been lost for good thanks to missing or forgotten login data. Novogratz is confident that there won’t be any more bitcoins added to this forgotten world thanks to the asset’s extended price.
At the time of writing, bitcoin has shot back up to $39,000, which in turn is a small dip from $40,000. Either way you look at it, the currency has seemingly returned to form and is once again entering the bullish territory so many people have come to know and expect in recent months, and its latest drop to $33,000 was likely a fluke of sorts.
Thus, many people are likely to want to take advantage of this high price and won’t want their money compromised. Therefore, they’re likely to remember their passwords and login data with general ease, according to Novogratz, and he thinks the days of losing bitcoins for this reason are long gone.
In a recent interview, he comments:
Our estimate is three million were lost. When bitcoin was one cent or four cents or 20 cents, people didn’t take it that seriously. Most of the lost bitcoins aren’t happening today… They happened right at the early onset of this thing.
People Want to Be Rich
At the end of the day, he states that while bitcoin was initially created to be a payment currency and is now seen as a store of value, many people still utilize it for speculative reasons, and are thus investing in BTC because they’re eager to make lots of money. He mentions:
No one’s losing bitcoin anymore… One reason I never thought bitcoin would be a currency – fixed supply currencies don’t work. They’re too easily squeezed. They go up in price as more and more people enter the ecosystem. We don’t want to buy shoes one day with something that’s worth one dollar and worth two dollars the next day.
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