In 2011, programmer Stefan Thomas took payment for a “What is Bitcoin?” educational video in Bitcoin, and the 7,002 BTC he received has since become the kind of fortune people build entire security teams around. The private keys sit on an IronKey encrypted USB drive, protected by a password Thomas once wrote down and then lost. IronKey is built to permanently lock and delete its contents after 10 wrong attempts, and Thomas has already burned eight. He has brought in outside help, from digital forensics firm Naxo to security researcher Chris Tarnovsky, but the money is still stuck behind two final guesses.

Every so often, crypto’s promise of self-sovereignty collides with something painfully human: a forgotten password. Programmer Stefan Thomas learned that lesson the hard way after earning 7,002 Bitcoin in 2011 for making a “What is Bitcoin?” educational video, as described in most recent reporting. With Bitcoin trading around $111,000, that stash has been valued at roughly $777 million.

Thomas did what plenty of early believers did: he tucked the keys away for later. He stored the wallet’s private keys on an encrypted USB drive and wrote the password on a piece of paper, then lost it. The money is still there, just out of reach, a reminder that “be your own bank” can also mean “be your own help desk.”

The device at the center of this is an IronKey, built to keep secrets even from determined attackers. That toughness comes with a hard limit: after 10 incorrect password attempts, the drive permanently locks and deletes its contents. Thomas has already burned 8 tries, leaving only 2 guesses before the door closes for good, per accounts summarized in recent coverage.

Even the manufacturer has offered no comforting escape hatch. A Kingston spokesperson put it bluntly: “There is no backup password or alternative method, other than the original password that was set up by the user to retrieve the data.” The IronKey was designed to resist extraction, and in this story, that design goal is doing exactly what it says on the box.

As Bitcoin’s price climbed, the numbers attached to Thomas’s lockout became surreal. His holdings were estimated at about $91 million in 2020, then roughly $235 million by October 2023, with another account putting it near $253 million in late 2025. The last two password attempts have effectively become a high-stakes decision tree: guess, or keep waiting.

Thomas has explored recovery efforts, including turning down Unciphered because he already had verbal agreements with two other teams, Naxo and security researcher Chris Tarnovsky, known for chip-level reverse engineering, as outlined in a detailed rundown. Tarnovsky told WIRED his involvement amounted to a single call in 2023, saying, “I want Stefan to cough up some money up front.” Thomas summed up the pace in a 2023 Thinking Crypto interview: “When you’re dealing with so much money, everything takes forever.” As of late 2025, the IronKey was still stored in a Swiss vault, and by mid-2026 there’s been no confirmed recovery.

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