Man has just two password guesses left before he loses £180m in his Bitcoin account

Stefan Thomas is trying to remember the code to a small hard drive, known as an IronKey, to access 7,002 Bitcoin, which were yesterday worth £25,637.95 each.

The price of Bitcoin has soared with a rise of 720 per cent since March 2020 but Thomas lost the piece of paper on which he wrote his password.

The device allows for ten attempts but he’s tried eight times and if he doesn’t get it right in the next two tries, the device will be permanently encrypted and the money lost forever.

Stefan says he was given the Bitcoin in 2011 as a reward for making an animation.

 Stefan, who now lives in San Francisco in the US, said: “I would just lay in bed and think about it.

“Then I’d go to the computer with some new strategy and it wouldn’t work and I’d be desperate again.”

Wallet Recovery Services, which helps find lost digital keys, said it gets 70 requests a day for lost passwords.

Stefan, who made another fortune on a rival currency called Ripple, plans to put his IronKey into a secure facility until he or others find a way of cracking it.

He added: “It’s for my own sanity.”