Well it won't be forever. Eventually we will figure out the math to generate a private key for any bitcoin address.

At which point the coins will no longer have a value that is relevant

Or there will be a period of obscurity in which both the math is known (to some/few) and they will secretly profit off that knowledge.

More likely a bip (bitcoin improvement proposal) will be introduced that makes the math useless by changing key structure.

There are good reason's why hardware tokens are more secure than password managers. First they are often damn near impossible to clone.

Offer someone 10% of the $200 million to find a zero day for it. That creepy Israeli company makes cracks for secure enclaves for lower prices than that, and for much newer security hardware.

If nothing else find a university with an election microscope and give some CS students a project of reading the key bits directly.

Enclaves keep out petty thieves, not determined attackers with unlimited physical access. Chapter 1 of cybersecurity is no hardware can protect against that.

It just isn't believable that you can have a storage drive sitting in front of you which contains both encrypted data and the decryption key (or at least the password-encrypted decryption key) and yet not be able to access the data.

Reading between the lines I think he has some sort of weird ass hardware coin wallet/high security encrypted flash drive that has some anti tamper smarts. I think the journalist used the word encrypted wrong here:

>Thomas has just two attempts left to guess the password before it's encrypted and lost forever.

I suspect they meant the drive would wipe itself after another attempt.

You could attempt to pull the controller chip and decap to extract the secondary key which would allow you unlimited attempts

You think they didn't thought about it?

it's on an IronKey.

This one would be extremely difficult.

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/IronKey_teardown.pdf

The drive's firmware could be preventing that from happening: https://www.trentonsystems.com/blog/self-encrypting-drives

Although I don't think they have the auto-destruct feature.

But with 200M+ at stake, I'd put out a bounty for someone to reverse engineer the firmware.

Edit: sibling commenter says it's IronKey, reading about it, reverse engineering won't be that trivial...

It wouldn’t be. You’d think for a $50m or even $100m bounty, you could get people who hoard 0-days like Cellebrite to do it. I don’t know.

If it were me, I would easily give up half of it to get the money back.