
There’s no shame in losing a password. I’ve done it, you’ve done it — it’s just a factor of having dozens of different accounts on various services and being told you shouldn’t re-use the same password on different sites. That said, the worst this gets for most of us is missing out on a Jimmy John’s coupon locked behind the vault of a Yahoo Mail account you haven’s used in a decade. For Kevin Durant there’s an untold fortune locked behind a door he can’t open.
Durant was a guest at the Boardroom conference this week alongside his longtime business manager and agent Rick Kleiman, where we got one of the most hilarious anecdotes of the year.
The timeline goes a little something like this: Kleiman was at a birthday party for Kevin Durant circa 2016 and everyone was talking about Bitcoin. The next morning the pair invested money together to buy Bitcoin through Coinbase. Then they both forgot about it, lost the account info, and have been locked out for almost a decade now.
Easily the best part of this is Durant confidently saying “it’s in the cloud,” which I’m absolutely 100 percent sure he doesn’t know what that means and it’s also inaccurate.
Most crypto sites have extreme security on accounts because of the prevalence for theft and fraud, so it’s not as simple as clicking the “forgot password” button. Now the real question becomes: How much money is in this account?
One would have to assume that if a ton of money was invested, upwards of $1M, then the duo would have had safeguards in place. We’ll operate under the assumption that Durant invested $100,000 in Bitcoin at the time, which is a ton for most of us — but a small risk for someone like Durant.
Durant’s birthday is September 29 — so let’s assume they bought the $100,000 of Bitcoin on September 30, 2016. It closed the day at $609.73. This means that Durant could have bought 164 coins with the money. Now, I think if you’re tossing that kind of money around you want a nice, clean, round number. I think Durant actually bought 200 Bitcoin even at a cost of $121,946.
Fast-forward to today: 200 Bitcoin is now worth $23,579,632.
There is literally millions and millions of dollars in Bitcoin in an account that Durant can’t access. What a time to be alive.