David Schwartz, current principal applied science officeholder at Ripple, is responding to reports his predecessor had lost access to hundreds of millions of dollars in Bitcoin.

In a Quora post on Thursday, Schwartz said recent reports about quondam Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas forgetting the countersign to an encrypted hard bulldoze containing thousands of Bitcoin (BTC) were truthful, but added Thomas had besides lost access to hundreds of coins when the crypto asset was young.

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.

"He would create unspent outputs with '1.0' Bitcoin because that was the fastest and easiest number to type," said Schwartz. "He likely created hundreds of such accounts, none of which he retained the keys for considering they were just for quick experiments. Each of those accounts is worth $38,000 or so today."

Even just 1 hundred of these accounts at 100 BTC would mean the coins within are worth more than $three million. The price of Bitcoin has fluctuated betwixt $thirty,000 and $40,000 since reaching an best of more than $42,000 on January. 8.

Last week, a New York Times profile on Thomas said that the High german-born programmer has used eight out of ten attempts to guess the password to access an encrypted difficult drive containing 7,002 BTC. He has only 2 guesses left on the IronKey hard drive before the data — and funds — are seemingly lost.

Schwartz confirmed the story on Quora, saying Thomas had put aside the coins, which were role of a payment for creating a video. All the same, he questioned the $200+ million figure cited past major news outlets:

"I believe today [Thomas' Bitcoin is] worth about $114 one thousand thousand. I'grand non sure where the $240 meg number is coming from — maybe I'yard remembering incorrect."

In that location are many similar stories of long lost Bitcoin from early in the coin's development. Terminal week, Cointelegraph reported that a student had establish private keys to access more than than $4 million worth of Bitcoin at his grandfather'southward house over the holidays.