Bitcoin Investor In Turkey Lost $170,000 After Losing Wallet Password And Recovery Backup Codes

Bitcoin Investor Lost $170k After Losing Backup Codes

Virtual currency wallets have been used by investors in order to secure their assets and control their funds. One of the main points of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies is ‘to be your own bank’ and that means to be responsible for the funds you own. Due to the lack of backup, a Turkish investor called Kerem Albayrak, lost $170,000 because he lost his password and wallet recovery information.

In a recent Reddit post, the user says that he lost all the information about his hot wallet while trying to exchange a laptop computer at an Apple store. However, he forgot to save all his wallet information and password and make a copy of it. When he realized that he gave his computer with all the information inside, the device was already formatted and the information lost.

About it, he mentioned:

“My wallet was newly transferred onto a Blockchain wallet created on the iMac after I had an incident with an offline wallet and got scared. I used an auto generate password by Apple with no iCloud to backup the keychain. When creating the assword, I took a screenshot on the iMac of the recovery phrase which is also now gone.”

The post in Reddit received several comments. One of them says that he was just negligent and that this situation happened to him because he did not take things seriously about his funds. As soon as a password or private key is lost, the funds are gone. Another thing that one of the most upvoted comments mentioned is that he should have stored his information in several places as a backup in case something happened.

According to a year-old estimation made by Chainalysis, there are around $30 billion worth ot Bitcoin that may have been lost forever. More than half of them have been lost or just mispalced. There are several individuals and investors that have lost their funds in this way.

The problem that Mr. Albayrak experienced should be taken as a warning to the whole crypto community. It is always important to understand how wallets work and how coins must be protected.