Police are unable to confiscate $ 60 million in Bitcoin
German authorities are facing a difficult problem after seizing a digital wallet by a convicted fraudster that includes more than 1,700 Bitcoins worth more than 50 million euros ($ 60 million).
The German prosecutors confiscated the currency, but the problem was that they could not access the funds because the fraudster refused to provide them with the password.
The helpful thing about Bitcoin is that many of its advantages are apparent, such as the ability to own it anonymously and transfer it securely.
The man was sentenced to prison and served his term since then, remaining silent the whole time while police made repeated unsuccessful efforts to crack the password to gain access to more than 1,700 Bitcoins, said a public prosecutor in the Bavarian town of Kempten.
"We asked him but he didn't say, maybe he doesn't know," Attorney General Sebastian Murer told Reuters on Friday.
Bitcoin is stored through a program known as a digital wallet secured by encryption, and the password is used as a decryption key to open the wallet and access the digital currency.
When the password is lost, the user cannot open the wallet.
The fraudster was sentenced to more than two years in prison for secretly installing software on other computers to harness their power in mining or producing Bitcoins.
While the fraudster was spending his time behind bars, his Bitcoin stock was worth a fraction of the current value.
Bitcoin has soared over the past year, hitting a record high of $ 42,000 in January, and trading at $ 37,577 on Friday, according to cryptocurrency and blockchain website Coindesk.
But prosecutors asserted that the man could not access the funds after his release from prison even if he had the password and tried to use it later.
The German news organization BR says: that if the authorities have access, it is assumed that the digital currencies will be sold with their value going to the state treasury, because the currency was not stolen from anyone, but was mined using the penetrating computing power.
Lately, several issues around passwords, PINs, and their mass absence have surfaced in stories about Bitcoin.
There was a recent story in the New York Times about a programmer who had a fortune of Bitcoin saved on a secure disk, and this story revealed an amazing statistic, as about 20 percent of the Bitcoin currency in existence today (totaling $ 140 billion) is lost or preserved in wallets that include Lost passwords, which means they are inaccessible.