When was the last time losing your password actually helped you and didn’t cause you to give up, put down your phone and turn on the TV? In the case of NBA superstar Kevin Durant, losing a password may have made him a whole lot of money.
Kevin Durant’s lost password
Durant reportedly couldn’t find the password to his Coinbase account, which holds all the bitcoin he bought back in 2016 while playing for the Golden State Warriors.
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His agent, Rich Kleiman, was delighted.
“We’ve yet to be able to track down his Coinbase account info, so we’ve never sold anything, and this bitcoin is just through the roof,” Kleiman said Tuesday at CNBC’s Game Plan conference in Los Angeles. “It’s just a process we haven’t been able to figure out, but Bitcoin keeps going up … so, I mean, it’s only benefited us.”
Durant began buying bitcoin after he, Kleiman and several of his 2016 Olympic teammates attended a dinner where the teammates continuously discussed cryptocurrency.
“I just heard the word ‘bitcoin’ 25 times this evening, and the next day, we started investing in bitcoin,” Kleiman said.
Bitcoin traded in the hundreds at that time and now trades at more than $117,000. That’s an 11,000% return on investment.
In other words, Durant shot a 3-pointer that ended up being worth 330 points.
Even Steph Curry hasn’t done that yet — but in his defense, he wasn’t on the 2016 Olympic team. And he’s also doing just fine, financially speaking.
Kleiman said Durant hadn’t been able to access the account for years, but he added that’s only benefited him since he hasn’t sold at all as bitcoin’s value skyrockets — fitting since Durant will play for the Houston Rockets starting next month.
A representative from Coinbase told Business Insider that Durant regained access to the account but didn’t disclose how much the cryptocurrency was now worth.
Lost crypto accounts
Coinbase said in a statement to CNBC that users can reset their passwords using self-service tools.
But Durant’s not alone in losing access to a lot of crypto money.
Take Stefan Thomas, for example. He’s struggling to unlock a digital wallet containing more than 7,000 bitcoins, worth more than $1 billion.
As of last month, he has two password attempts left. Otherwise, the hardware will erase itself forever, and Thomas will never lose another password again for the rest of his life.
Then there’s James Howells. He threw away a hard drive in 2013 that he believes holds the key to nearly $800 million worth of bitcoin.
He’s been fighting local authorities in court to search a landfill for that hard drive, and now he has a new plan.
“Am considering purchasing a landfill site. Funding secured,” he wrote on X.
