I’m curious if the bitcoins are even still readable at this point. My understanding is the charges in the memory cells of a usb stick will gradually dissipate over time, and after more than ten years, much of that information may be lost.

You could periodically plug a standard usb drive to refresh the memory, but will that work with these hardware encrypted drives w/o a password?

Would like to now how it ends, if ever. I imagine that guy can sell his drive, or set up a show out of it. Is there any other reason for him to refuse, like keeping ‘this one guy’ rep, or just being used to how it is?