Of the existing 18.5m Bitcoin, around 20 percent — currently worth around $140b — appear to be in lost or otherwise stranded wallets, according to the cryptocurrency data firm Chainalysis. Wallet Recovery Services, a business that helps find lost digital keys, said it had gotten 70 requests a day from people who wanted help recovering their riches, three times the number of a month ago.
“I would just lay in bed and think about it,” Mr. Thomas said. “Then I would go to the computer with some new strategy, and it wouldn’t work, and I would be desperate again.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/technology/bitcoin-passwords-wallets-fortunes.html