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?

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?