The former Ripple (XRP) CTO, 7000 BTC in a hardware wallet and their recovery potential: the story

In September, a Seattle startup lab sent evidence to a senior writer at WIRED magazine that white hat hackers could crack an IronKey S200 thumb drive containing 7,002 bitcoins.

But former Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas surprisingly turned down an offer from Seattle startup Unciphered to acquire the USB drive.

F.M. Ripple CTO is approaching his 7002 Bitcoins.

Thomas told Wired that he had already hired another team to deal with the problem.

The former head of Ripple Labs wants to give them a fair shake by issuing 7002 bitcoins before hiring another company. He mentioned that if they couldn't come up with a workable solution together, they could subcontract the Seattle company.

The cyber security firm that cracked the IronKey S200 isn't showing its tricks. But without a memory stick exposed, they generated three randomly generated passphrases.

They say it only took 200 trillion attempts using a high-performance computer to find three correct passphrases. It could be a cool preview of how quantum computers will disrupt cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ripple.

The dangers of DIY banking with Bitcoin

Not only has his experience working with Ripple Labs, but he has had 7,002 bitcoins locked away on a thumb drive since 2011, making Thomas well-qualified to provide a critical review of the “be your own bank” narrative that accompanies bitcoin.

“This whole idea of ​​being your own bank — let me put it this way: Do you make your own shoes? The reason we have banks is because we don't want to deal with everything banks do.”

Ripple is a blockchain-based digital payments platform and money transfer service for financial institutions around the world. Bitcoin is the creator of hash-based blockchains that work on an open peer-to-peer network to settle payments quickly.

Ripple was trading at $0.55 at the time of writing. Bitcoin traded at $34,000.