Bitcoin

Remember when we told you how one guy lost the password to $220 million? Wired reports that hackers have finally figured out how to crack the encrypted IronKey thumbdrive where those Bitcoins are stored.

But get this: the owner doesn’t (yet) want their help. Intriguing!

David Marcus left Facebook in 2021 after the company failed to launch the cryptocurrency project he oversaw. Now he’s back with a startup called Lightspark that wants to make it easy for developers to facilitate payments through the Lighting Network, a layer-two protocol for enabling fast transactions with fractions of Bitcoins.

It’s interesting to see someone of Marcus’s stature (he was the president of PayPal before joining Facebook) launching a crypto company right now, especially one that is focused exclusively on Bitcoin. I’ll have more from my interview with him in Thursday’s edition of Command Line —you can subscribe at the link below to get it in your inbox — and a future episode of Decoder.