Loss of asset through account lockouts have been a very pressing issue within this industry since time immemorial. An estimated 23% of the whole 21 million supply of bitcoins have been lost over time, which by today's price would be around $100 billion.
Come on, didn't we smash that myth to pieces when we just established that the methodology behind that data is completely meaningless? You can't claim that 1/4 of all BTC is lost because they haven't moved from their addresses for 4 or 5 years - that's like saying someone's money in the bank is lost because someone hasn't withdrawn a single cent for 5 years.
And we can't forget about that software engineer who is down to the last 2 attempts to his IronKey before it totally shuts itself off, so no wonder there's a market for this type of issues.
He is not the only one who faced such a problem in his life, although it is strange to me that many of such cases are related to people who are some kind of engineers from the field of IT and who should know much better than what they have shown. However, the tens of thousands of BTC that were lost in this way are far from all those millions that are speculated to have been lost.
Just about today I stumbled upon an article that talks about Crypto Recovery, pioneered by a father and son duo, who are both adept at tech (obviously). Apparently, they offer services to help recover passwords to your bitcoin wallets should you ever come to need one. In any case, no user testimonials have been given out, so the credibility of this service is still in question, at least for me.
So what do you guys think, will a feature like this be possible? At least before quantum computers become ubiquitous? What are your thoughts about this?
Everything that father and son are doing is nothing but trying to brute force lost passwords from desktop/mobile wallets, they are not hacking Bitcoin in any way with quantum computers or something similar. If a person who has lost or forgotten the password of his crypto wallet knows roughly what that password should look like (length, characters used, coin addresses), then he can try to brute force the password himself using various programs that exist and are publicly available.