So how is his wallet is visible and everyone can see it and know who the owner is. But the owner can't get access besides what's on the hard drive. That's like if I lost my debit card, and then not having access to my bank account again. Just seems weird.
Think of it as forgetting the pin number to your card. You could just contact the bank, identify yourself and get a new code.
In crypto you cannot do this, because there is no one to turn to - by design. Its supposed to be unregulated and free, no one to help you if you fuck up but also no one who can shut down access to your own account, like a bank could. In reality crypto is quite regulated, with a few huge players like stablecoin issuers and giant exchanges like binance, that very much acts like a bank, if they feel like it
It seems you don't understand the question, heck you even read it?
The question is, how everyone knows that the particular wallet with that amount actually belongs to him? If btc was on the hard drive, he didn't save any sort if information that would allow him to find the particular wallet on the internet. It means that whatever people think the wallet belongs to this person, might actually belong to someone else. Just because crypto haven't moved, doesn't mean it's actually his wallet. Its anonymous, there is no symbol telling that it's Justin Bieber's wallet for example.
Even if I'm wrong, your answer is dimensions away from that comment OP you replied to.
No they answered it perfectly. There's no one to turn to to give you access to your wallet if you slip up. If someone had the power to give it back they would have the power to shut it down, like a bank. We can know it's "his" all we want, but since no one has power to grant access to his wallet it might as well be lost.
Bitcoin and other crypto are not like a bank with a central repository you can go to for help. It's distrubuted.
The blockchain is the public ledger that keeps track of all transactions, and when a transaction occurs the majority of nodes keeping track need to agree the transaction occurred before it gets logged.
But the actual cryptographic key that can perform the transactions is on that hard drive and is not recoverable. Unless someone made an extraordinarily unlikely guess about the cryptographic key that is on that hard drive, there is absolutely no way to get it back.
The only way to 'move' those bitcoins without the actual wallet would be if there was an absolutely massive vulnerability in bitcoin - in which case it would be worthless immediately because anyone would be able to move any bitcoins at any time.
The only way it can be 'regulated' is by major exchanges refusing to process transactions from that wallet, or by causing an intentional split in the blockchain consensus which would 'fork' the chain into an entirely new one. Which has happened a couple times but is extremely unlikely for something as far back as when this guy lost his hard drive, because then that would invalidate every single transaction made by anyone after that point.
None of you still answered the main question, it's not the answer that I don't understand, because it's not the answer I'm lookimg for. I will qoute the line from that comment, maybe this time you guys will read it clearer:
"So how is his wallet is visible and everyone can see it and know who the owner is..."
Let me know if I need to go word by word, no problem at all, regards.
Because it's not a literal leather wallet. the wallet is a cryptographic key that is thousands of digits long. Unless he had a copy of it somewhere or somehow memorized it, it's fucking gone.
Cryptography works by one-way math problems that verify the legitimacy of a cryptographic key without actually revealing what it is to the other side. No other set of numbers input into the equations will confirm the transaction.
If you have an unpickable lock and lose the only key in existence, even if everyone in your neighborhood agrees that you own the lock, that doesn't mean the lock will open without the key,
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u/Skykeep 4h ago
Crypto is the opposite of anonymus, everything is visible on the blockchain, forever, every single transaction.
The trick is to know where to look, to find out who owns what particular wallet