As bitcoin skyrockets up, German prosecutors are holding around 1,700, that were confiscated from a bitcoin miner.The bitcoin miner, who was from Kempten, Bavaria, was not named in the report. He was sentenced to about two years in prison after installing bitcoin mining software on others’ computers, using them remotely to build a sum of bitcoin, according to Reuters.
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At the time of this writing, one bitcoin was worth $48,422, which makes the suspect’s stash worth $82,317,400.
But it might as well be a winning lottery ticket from Russia as the man is unable to give them the password to unlock the cryptocurrency. Officials did not indicate whether the suspect refused or simply forgot his password.
According to Business Insider, He reportedly kept his mined bitcoin in a password-protected digital wallet, which is a common way to hold the digital currency.
Without the password, there’s no way to open a digital wallet.
20% of all bitcoin or around 20 billion dollars is reportedly inaccessible because of lost passwords and stories are rampant of investors watching their fortunes rise as they are unable to access it. In January, a man from the Welsh city of Newport said he’d mistakenly thrown away about 7,500 bitcoin, worth about $275 million.