In 2011, a Swiss programmer named Stefan Thomas made an animated video called “What is Bitcoin?” — one of the first explainers most people ever saw. He was paid 7,002 BTC for it, which at the time was a generous fee for a video and not a sovereign wealth fund. He put the private keys on an IronKey: a small, hardened USB drive with one security feature that matters to this story. It allows ten password attempts. Then it encrypts itself forever.
He wrote the password on a piece of paper. He lost the piece of paper.
Over the following years, Thomas — who went on to become CTO of Ripple, which is to say this is not a careless man — tried his eight best guesses. All eight failed. He has two remaining. The drive holds the number at the top of this page, and the number refreshes every hour, and the guess count does not.
He has described the experience of trying a guess as lying awake beforehand, working up the courage for weeks. Most of us have felt that about an email. His version costs hundreds of millions per keystroke.
In 2023, the story turned. A Seattle security firm called Unciphered announced it had developed a non-destructive way to bypass that exact IronKey model's attempt counter — claiming success on more than a thousand test units — and publicly offered to open his. Thomas said no. Terms, trust, the calculus of handing strangers a nine-figure drive; he engaged other researchers instead, and none of the parties have announced a result since. As of this filing, the drive reportedly sits in a vault in Switzerland. Locked. Ten minus eight.
The Bureau's finding: UNRESOLVED, and the file stays open. This is the most expensive game of hangman ever played, the board is two letters from over, and the man holding the chalk has chosen, for now, not to play. The Bureau respects the nerve and cannot watch.