FAQ's
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Think about a toast, to the honesty of people who understand though not perfect, we can turn to the law for protection and recovery of our property.
Tohonesty’s unique value is to place our clients into the hands of professionals with the expertise to recover your digital assets even without access to keys. Using the law, though court orders and injunctions, these experts will try their best to put the client into a position where they have full spendable access to their digital assets once again, as if that ability had never been lost.
Most recovery services only deal with seizing and freezing the assets. A fait accompli where there is no more real work to be done. And though important, this only stops others from spending the assets or mixing or dispersing them in some way, while not regaining spend-ability for the legal owner . For example they might be in possession of a wallet file which contains the assets, but the assets are still unspendable because keys are not available to the owner.
Summing up, Tohonesty will do our best to help the client gain injunctions ordering miners to re-assign their assets to a secure blockchain address which the owner does have keys for, specified within the injunction, by connecting you to experts with the ability to recover your assets professionally.
accidentally: lost private key, seedphrase, passphrase, hardware or wallet file
estate management: where no instructions were left for access to the digital assets
stolen: from hacked exchanges, computers or appropriated illegally in any way
any other form of loss
This all depends on how feasible it is to actually make the recovery. And this feasibility includes things like legal jurisdiction, the complexity of the legal process. The team of experts Tohonesty will refer you to are likely to initially perform a feasibility study that will give you the data needed to make an informed decision on how to proceed and how long it will likely take to recover your assets.
This means it’s difficult for us to say how long it will take. I would recommend planning for an extended period of time, rather than expect quick success. The good news is its in everyones best interest to succeed as quickly as possible.
Keys are cryptographic parts of a larger digital asset system which function much like passwords. There is much more to it than this but in the interests of brevity, a private key is what allows whomever is in possession of the key, technically but not necessarily legally, to spend the digital asset.
Be careful here. If you lose your keys, you no longer have the ability to spend your assets. Much like if you lose your car keys, you can no longer drive the car. But in law this does not mean you are no longer the owner of the car.
Tohonesty’s unique service is to find the professionals who will do their best legally to help you gain possession of a new set of keys that will once again allow you to spend your assets. All backed by the security and guarantees of the law. Briefly this means a court order to re-assign your assets to a new address where these new keys are safe and secure.
A wallet in its simplest form consists of a piece of software on a computer made up from a pair of private and public cryptographic keys. Again there is much more to it than this. To keep it simple, a wallet typically will be a phone app containing your keys, digital assets associated with those keys and a record of transactions you have made using both.
A wallet can be as sophisticated as the wallet provider needs it to be for their business and the clients needs. But this is the bare bones of it.
A wallet is important to a client because its the place where they can be sure their assets are stored as private property. The location of a wallet can be custodial – for example the data will be held by a third party such as a crypto exchange. Or non-custodial which means the client must secure their assets on local devices on which only they have control.
We are experts on the Bitcoin protocol described in the original 2009 white paper, just prior to the first ever Bitcoin network being launched in public. We can show you quickly that possession of keys alone, is not ownership. And it is ownership that matters in the end under the law.
Imagine your car keys were lost or in the possession of someone else. You still own the car legally. The law as always can put that straight immediately and order your keys to be returned.
This is something we all understand quickly. There is absolutely nothing special about digital assets as private property. They will be subject to the law just like all other property. If you’re told otherwise, those people either do not understand the technology or are politically aligned in some way, which effectively means they are not permitted to understand the technology too. Either way we recommend you exercise caution when engaging with them.
Again the narrative informs the public that digital assets like Bitcoin are new and different here. But its the law which decides who is the owner. Not a piece of software, a crypto exchange, a pundit, a politician or a software developer.
What this person is trying to make you believe is a popular urban myth. A myth which maintains popular support due to the arcane and often misunderstood functions of digital assets. They’re saying that if you do not have access to your keys or wallet any more, you are to all intents and purposes no longer the owner of these assets. And whomever is in possession of the keys, if anyone, is the new owner. Obviously this is absurd in the real world. But the myth sticks hard and fast, as designed.
You must have heard about things called ‘narratives’ – collectively shared stories which the general public tends to believe despite not having taken much time looking into the evidence supporting them. They are stories which are easy to accept prima facie because everyone recognises intuitively that most other people also believe them. This hidden yet vicious circle makes a commitment to the story and the consequences of committing to it, apparently less risky – “everyone else believes it so its more likely to be true”. Reputation leads the social group – no one ever lost friends or their job for believing in and projecting the narrative.
So these stories can quickly command a powerful and widespread influence, particularly when it comes to the rather important matter of who owns what. Especially then. Digital assets are very well understood to count as property, in law. The law will protect them equally to all other forms of property. There are no exceptions to this rule.
Bitcoin has been going since 2009. During that time a narrative has developed which tells you that if you are not in possession of your keys, you no longer own your digital assets. And it is pure misinformation, reinforced by a powerful narrative. Do not believe it.
Hundreds of billions of dollars of asset value has been lost or transferred illegally largely thanks to the success of this narrative.
If you can show the law enough evidence linking your identity to the digital property, the law will declare it is fully yours and can be recovered using the same methods used for recovery of all other forms of property.
For further history on how this all came about by all means use the ‘Register your case’ form and we’ll get back to you on how to proceed
We give you these numbers to make it clear how big the problem of lost coin is and to visualise where you stand as a digital asset owner in the whole scheme of things.
Professional research indicates about 20% of all digital assets currently distributed, has been ‘lost’. By lost we mean owners believe it no longer belongs to them because they no longer are in possession of their keys, wallet or it was stolen on an exchange.
ToHonesty maintains a lost coin recovery database (LCR) to keep our eyes on how much is lost, how much is recoverable and other data points useful to our analysis in helping our clients recover their assets.
- 3.79 million of all digital assets distributed so far amounts to about US$402 billion. This is the total amount available for recovery. If you have lost your digital property, it will come out of this number
- The largest private individual lost coin owner is about US$11 billion.
- A theoretical representative action for accounts in the Mt. Gox exchange hack could recover up to 850,000 in digital property or about US$90 Billion
- The Tulip Trust which may or may not be a lost asset is valued at $117 billion
- Our LCR database shows the top 10 individual Lost Coin Owners are valued at over US$15 billion
- There will be tens of thousands of smaller yet not insignificant family owners amounting to $billions, some of which we eventually aim to recover in a class action
- Our LCR database has already captured about 10% of the total digital assets distributed. And nearly 60% of estimated lost digital assets.
Note: Numbers are estimates. Unless otherwise stated, ToHonesty uses Bitcoin Core (BTC) , a soft fork of the original Satoshi protocol, as a reference blockchain, because it has by far the largest number and highest value of lost coins. All values priced up with BTC @$106,653 on 20 Jan 25
Tohonesty does not provide financial advice in any shape or form. We are neither trained nor licensed to do that under current regulations. Nor does Tohonesty, store, transfer or manage in any way whatsoever, client digital or financial assets. We are a client referral company, attempting to connect clients who have lost assets to professionals who will try to recover them for you. That is is all. So if you find yourself speaking to someone masquerading as Tohonesty offering financial advice please end that conversation and contact us immediately.
What service are we providing our clients? Tohonesty is a client discovery service, finding clients who have lost digital assets in any way. Following agreement with each client we will instruct another business of expert analysts and lawyers who are skilled and experienced in proceeding with the recovery process itself. Following successful recovery of your property our partner will pay us a fee for finding you as a client. Once connected with these experts, they will discuss with you how to proceed next and what the service might cost to you. You can then make up your own mind about if you wish to proceed.
Central to the success of our business are professionalism, trust and confidence. We recognise that clients, having lost property, are often less likely on average to trust or have confidence in other businesses in the digital property field. So a key part of our success is building that trust between clients and Tohonesty as a first duty.
I sometimes get asked this question by smart people genuinely interested in how our method works.
It’s about trying to understand how we can still recover your assets easily, even after a thief spreads your stolen assets out so widely, it feels like it’s now impossible to recover.
As always, the answer is the same in every case you can imagine. Because crypto, in the eyes of the law, is identical in every way to all other forms of property, the recovery method will use existing well known techniques. One does not have to go into the precise mechanics of it, legal experts and analysts already know and have done for a thousand years.
The question is really about ‘money laundering’ and how to overwhelm the attempt by thieves to hide the assets from the law. Money laundering has been a scam method since the dawn of time. So any remediation will be the same as has been used since the dawn of time too.
The way to treat this question is about a ‘change of mind’ – a mindset problem, metanoia. That’s to say, there is absolutely nothing fundamentally different in the law, between crypto and any other financial asset that has ever existed. If you can change your mind, stop believing the crypto narrative and look at it free from that blindfold, you will get it, immediately.
The answer must then be: do whatever has always been done to remediate stolen assets which have been widely dispersed. And, that is all.
The only difference between crypto and everything else across history, is superficial – crypto is easier to disperse by ‘mixing’ and more finely. Its not difficult to spread the assets over thousands of wallets, quickly. Many wallet holders will know it is the proceeds of crime. Many others will not know. And many more somewhere in between. But in the end, it really does not matter.
Crypto transactions, ironically, are not encrypted. All transactions are merely encoded in clear text and can be decoded by anyone using a free online tool. Therefore every Bitcoin transaction ever sent on chain, can be traced. Paper and metal cash can be traced too using the serial number but its very much easier with crypto. Digital deposits can also be traced electronically, but who will be tracing them and who will allow it? The law is very good at tracing with the help of highly skilled analysts. The only challenge to tracing crypto is the horse power needed. The greater the mixing the more cpu scale is needed to trace it out.
Why is even tracing scale not in the least bit a problem? Well, why bother tracing a fraudulent coffee transaction? But for a multi $million transaction, yes, the law, or the recovery team, would be very committed to spending money on it. The cost will be paid for out of the inevitable recovered proceeds. And when the attacker is identified and if they can be restrained within their jurisdiction, the law will step in for free and send them quickly to jail.
But that is not our concern at Tohonesty. All costs are priced into the asset recovery method way ahead of the game. And our method is a process of civil litigation alone. If the law wants to step in subsequently and call out a criminal offence, that is entirely a matter for the law. You have to remember that we recover lost as well as stolen assets. Often there is no crime.
To top it all off, the thief is moot to us. Because once traced and you have a court order in hand, miners must re-assign your assets back to a wallet you have the keys for, else face the shutting down of their $100 million business. Even if some still resist, a fork will be created in the blockchain and it will be just a matter of time before the illegal chain fails to maintain its hash rate, due to reputation, and their business will have wasted millions on electricity creating useless blocks. Can you see this? The network is now so big, it has become systemic. Making it to all intents secure from even a 51% attack(another crypto fallacy). Even a nation state attack would be futile because that nation would effectively raise a ‘tariff wall’ for crypto on their own border harming themselves firstly and mostly. The only thing remaining to worry about is ‘second order effects’ where the nation state says no anyway in spite of the harm that will bring upon itself and though this has been known to happen historically it is far rarer than a globalist conspiracy theorist will openly admit to. And in that extreme case there will be far bigger problems to worry about than a lost transaction.
The blockchain does not need to be modified, just amended with the new re-assign transaction indicating the original one is now invalid. In the same way accountants have been doing for centuries on their books. Often, even if there is a thief identified, who cares? They will not keep their ill gotten gains anyway.
Most crime gangs are constituted largely of stupid people. They believe the crypto narrative like a religion. Which says “put the proceeds of crime onto the network and you are safe”. Curiously, this is a public network, anyone can scan, which cannot be modified and the transactions are in clear text for cryin’ out loud! But the crypto narrative has convinced stupid people long ago that crypto is censorship resistant, ‘decentralised’, and if you’re not in possession of the keys you are no longer the owner of the coin, so cannot be touched by the law.
This fools belief system is a 100% fallacy. Do not fall for this powerful narrative if you are keen on looking after your ‘household’ securely. Most of any recovery effort is saved because so many people believe the crypto narrative and this is a great help to us, and you.
To sum up, it is easy to trace your assets for recovery, relative to other kinds of financial assets. It is simply a matter of using age old money laundering tracing techniques, just at scale and without needing de-cryption. The answer to the question in hand is simply to do things the way they have always been done. And that is the end of it.
If you’ve lost over a $million in crypto assets, call us and we will kick off the process to attempt to get your property back. $1M is the ‘total recovered asset value’ threshold we set to cover the analysis and legal costs at this early stage in this niche market. We’re sorry that the method cannot help yet for smaller sums, though we are collating a database for a potential class action law suit, so call us anyway to register for this if you see it has merit.
