A San Francisco man said he has "made peace" with the $250 million fortune that may have gotten away from him as a result of misplacing his Bitcoin password. Stefan Thomas explained that his 7,002 Bitcoin – which equates to nearly $250 million, have been out of his grasp since 2012. But those nine years have given Thomas enough time to process the potential loss. And while he says "time heals all wounds," the moments he first realised he couldn't access his cryptocurrency account were harrowing, to say the least. Thomas said he has used up of eight of his 10 tries to get the password right, having lost the paper he wrote it down on in 2012, and people around the world have tried to help him out. Eventually, Thomas reached "a really big milestone in [his] life where" he "realised how [he] was going to define [his] self-worth going forward." No doubt at least somewhat as a result of his experience, Thomas now believes there's a good reason that traditional financial institutions exist, as opposed to open-source money-exchange solutions like Bitcoin. "This whole idea of being your own bank – let me put it this way: Do you make your own shoes?" he told the Times. "The reason we have banks is that we don't want to deal with all those things that banks do."