In a Quora post on Thursday, Schwartz stated that recent reports about former Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas forgetting the password to an encrypted hard drive containing thousands of Bitcoin (BTC) were true, but added that Thomas had also lost access to hundreds of coins when the crypto asset was young.
According to Cointelegraph, the Ripple CTO said his predecessor used to test the development of a Javascript library for Bitcoin by using real coins when the price was well under a dollar.
Schwartz stated:
“He would create unspent outputs with ‘1.0’ Bitcoin because that was the fastest and easiest number to type. He likely created hundreds of such accounts, none of which he retained the keys for because they were just for quick experiments. Each of those accounts is worth $38,000 or so today.”
Even just one hundred of these accounts at 100 BTC would mean the coins within are worth more than $3 million. The price of Bitcoin has fluctuated between $30,000 and $40,000 since reaching an all-time of more than $42,000 on Jan. 8.
Schwartz confirmed the story on Quora, stating Thomas had put aside the coins, which were part of a payment for creating a video. Nonetheless, he questioned the $200+ million figure cited by major news outlets:
“I believe today [Thomas’ Bitcoin is] worth about $114 million. I’m not sure where the $240 million number is coming from — maybe I’m remembering wrong.”