Chances are, you have heard about horror stories of Bitcoin owners losing or forgetting passwords that could unlock millions and millions of dollars.
Well now, German authorities are having issues of their own.
They say a man sentenced to jail and has since served his term but maintained his silence while police made repeated failed efforts to crack the Bitcoin access code. The more than 1,700 Bitcoin stash is worth about $67.9 million.
The bitcoin miner, who was from Bavaria, was not named in the report.
He was sentenced to about two years in prison after installing Bitcoin mining software on others’ computers, using them to remotely to build a sum of bitcoin, according to Reuters.
He reportedly kept his mined Bitcoin in a password-protected digital wallet, which is a common way to hold the digital currency.
Without the password, there’s no way to open a digital wallet.
According to the the New York Times, about $140 billion dollars in Bitcoin, or about 20%, is stranded in wallets because owners forgot their passwords.
As the crypto currency has ballooned in the last few months, locked-out owners have watched the value climb. Bitcoin hit $40,000 last month for the first time, then $41,000, before pulling back.