Ukrainian MP reveals loss of access to wallet containing 400 BTC

Ukrainian officials who declared cryptocurrencies worth billions of hryvnias “simply don’t realise the trouble they’re in,” said David Arakhamiya, a deputy in the Verkhovna Rada, on air on «Украина 24».

«I think within a year to a year and a half one can expect dozens of criminal cases, because they [officials] will not be able to prove [the origin of the cryptocurrency]», — he said.

Arakhamiya noted that the data are easy to verify, since “Bitcoin is a very transparent currency, and the blockchain is visible to the whole world.”

The deputy himself had Bitcoin previously as well. While still an entrepreneur, his company began accepting cryptocurrency, “when Bitcoin first appeared.”

«I lost 400 BTC. At the time the Bitcoin security system was a single passphrase that needed to be known. I wiped the encrypted partition on the disk where it was recorded. Now it’s a terrifying amount, I don’t even want to think about it», — he said.

Earlier рассказывал, that for a long time he did not monitor the number of bitcoins in his wallet. However, in 2017, when the cryptocurrency rose to around $20,000, he decided to sell the coins but could not do so due to losing access to the wallet.

He said he stored the wallet key on a PGP disk:

«On the previous MacBook I ran out of disk space, and the PGP disk was encrypted and renamed to “Point.avi” as a film just in case. And when the disk filled up, I sorted through the files, saw a bunch of movies and deleted them».

In the 2020 declarations, Ukrainian officials listed more than 46 000 BTC.

The National Agency on Corruption Prevention of Ukraine said that it will examine the declared cryptocurrency.

Dnipro City Council deputy Vyacheslav Mishalov, who declared 18 000 BTC, has already described the figures as erroneous.

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