Jason Miller, a hypnotist in South Carolina has recently begun offering to help people recall forgotten passwords of their Bitcoin (EXANTE: Bitcoin)wallets or find misplaced storage devices. Miller charges one Bitcoin plus 5% of the amount recovered–though he claims that rate is flexible, Fortune reported.
“I’ve developed a collection of techniques that allow people to access older memories or see things they’ve put away in a stashed spot,” he told The Wall Street Journal.
A number of investors who bet on Bitcoin years ago are now in a painful limbo. In the way that bank accounts are protected by passwords, Bitcoin wallets that use ‘keys’ to transact are also typically guarded by complex security codes. However, unlike a bank, Bitcoin has no central hotline to call for a reset.
One such mourner is Mr. Philip Neumeier, who bought 15 Bitcoins for roughly $260 in 2013, when he was toying with the idea of accepting the virtual currency on his e-commerce site, reports the WSJ.
Now that his cache’s value is nearly $300,000, he’s trying to recover that long-forgotten password. Though he considered hypnosis to help recall the subconscious memory, he decided instead to build a supercomputer that tries to use “brute force” to crack the code.
The brute force required is hot and heavy work, and so the five foot-tall computer system sits in a 270 gallon tank of special mineral water to disperse the heat it generates.
Mr. Neumeier suggests it might even take a few hundred years to run through every possible combination of letters, numbers and symbols.
“I should probably be about 332 years old by then—hopefully Bitcoin will be worth something,” he told the WSJ.