[metaweta]

I'm in the USA. He paid us for some work up front and agreed to pay the rest on delivery of the key. He expected to spend most of the $100K he'd budgeted on GPU costs, so we got much less than that for the work; we took the job because it sounded like fun. We didn't need the information in the archived files, just the encryption headers, so he set most of the bytes to zero. I couldn't have spent the coins even if I wanted to.

[jodrellblank]

Thank you, that is interesting; he's wealthy enough and technically capable enough to make that all go a lot easier. (I guessed from going back to check on the process ID on his laptop that you must have had his laptop, and didn't know you could do that with just headers).