The more I read this story, the less sense it makes.
For starters, how did the theft of his phone number (and compromise of various accounts that relied on it for two-factor authentication) lead to him being locked out of his PC? Does Windows have an SMS-based password-reset option?
Then there’s this:
Though he did have some bitcoins in online services, particularly since his businesses accept bitcoin as payment, he kept almost all his bitcoins on an encrypted hard drive. “It was essentially my never-sell-this-until-it-goes-to-a-billion-dollars nest egg,” he says. He had kept it offline for most of the past several years, but had connected that device in recent weeks to move them somewhere more secure and sell some.
Never mind the fact that it should have been connected for exactly the length of time needed for those tasks and no longer, he left an object that was literally* worth more than its weight in gold** lying round his house or office for several weeks? What if he’d been burgled? Or had a fire?
* Literally “literally”, for those who followed a recent thread.
** Many, many times its weight. If the bitcoins on it were worth $2 million (which I think we can take as a minimum, as he talks of “millions of dollars’ worth”), then the equivalent mass of gold at its price on 11 August ($1,338.37 per troy ounce) would be 1,493.8 troy ounces, or a bit less than 46.5 kg.
