Why not hand it to DeepSeek to crack?


A programmer has 7,002 Bitcoin private key U-disks and only 2 password attempts left, worth about $777 million
Programmer Stefan Thomas holds an IronKey encrypted USB drive containing 7,002 Bitcoin private keys. The batch of Bitcoins came from compensation for his 2011 educational video “What is Bitcoin?”, recently valued at about $111k per coin and totaling about $777 million.
The IronKey device is set to permanently lock and delete the contents after 10 incorrect password attempts. Thomas has tried 8 times, leaving only 2 chances to enter the password. Kingston, the manufacturer, said that apart from the original password set by the user, there are no backup passwords or alternative recovery methods.
Thomas sought help from the digital forensics company Naxo and security researcher Chris Tarnovsky, and previously declined Unciphered because he had reached verbal agreements with two teams. As of the end of 2025, the IronKey is still stored in a Swiss vault, and recovery success has not been confirmed as of mid-2026. $BTC
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