A father and son who help clients find forgotten crypto passwords estimate billions of dollars worth of lost bitcoin is recoverable

[Kathleen Martin]

• A father and son team of computer programmers help people find lost passwords to their crypto wallets.
• Chris and Charlie Brooks conducted an analysis that led them to estimate between 68,110 and 92,855 seemingly lost bitcoins are recoverable.
• At current prices, the high end of the recoverable bitcoin estimate amounts to $4.7 billion.
• See more stories on Insider's business page.

For Chris and Charlie Brooks, finding lost passwords to cryptocurrency wallets requires figuring out how their clients' minds work - and that effort can help their customers retrieve a slice of what the pair estimates is about $4.7 billion worth of recoverable bitcoin stranded in locked wallets.
"We get a really broad spectrum of clients. We have a client who is an early-stage miner in bitcoin who lost all of his information and he knows he's got some bitcoins somewhere … We get clients who were told in 2017 to buy into the hype-bubble and they bought $1,000 [worth] and they are looking for something to cover the rent," Charlie, a 20-year-old computer programmer who joined his father in running Crypto Asset Recovery based in New Hampshire, told Insider in a video interview.
"One of our most recent cracks had about $250,000," in a blockchain wallet, said Charlie, who majored in computer science in college. He's put school aside for now to work at the business. "This is something I've always liked. I would follow along with my dad ... Online treasure hunting, it seemed really cool."
Nearly 40% of 1,000 US crypto owners in a recent survey from Cryptovantage said they had lost wallet passwords and, on average, those unable to find their passwords lost $2,134.
The jumping-off point of the duo's estimate of what can be recovered was a Chainalysis estimate that up to 20% of 18.5 million existing bitcoin appear to be lost or stranded in locked wallets. The figures were cited in January by The New York Times in a story about a San Francisco-based programmer who couldn't find the password to the hard drive that stored his 7,002 bitcoin. After eight wrong guesses, he had two left to figure out the password before the virtual currency was likely lost forever.
The Chainalysis figure sparked a question for the Brookses.
"Yes, that bitcoin is lost but if the owner of that bitcoin were motivated, what percentage of those do we think is reasonable to assume could be recovered?," said Chris, a 50-year-old computer programmer who started his business in 2017 and, after some time retooling, ramped up operations late last year when his son came on board.
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