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Shes been home more than a week and never mentioned anything to me about it.I went into her room and looked under her pillow. It wasnt there. I looked under her bed, dragging out the storage boxes to get a better view, using my phone as a flashlight.Carla I inquired.
Nothing but egg cartons, espresso grinds, and Amazon boxes. The orange part of paper has been decomposing somewhere under a pile of garbage in a Los Angeles landfill.Carla asked if losing the paper was a large deal.Not actually, I stated. Its just a hassle, thats all. Ill have to send all the bitcoins in the Trezor to an online wallet, reinitialize the Trezor, generate a new word list, and put the bitcoins straight back on the Trezor.
Its 551445. The Forgetting: April 4, 2017: 7.4 BTC $8,384I plugged the Trezor into my laptop and entered 551445. Wrong PIN entered.I must have made an error entering the PIN, I believed. I attempted 551445 again, taking good care to enter the digits correctly this time.Wrong PIN entered.Uh oh. I attempted a small variation: 554445Wrong PIN entered.This is absurd, I thought.
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Id entered it at least a dozen times in recent months without having to refer to the newspaper. OK, its probably 554145. Wrong PIN entered.I looked at the tiny monochrome screen on the bitcoin wallet and noticed a countdown timer had appeared. It was making me wait a few seconds before I could try another PIN.
I went to the hardware wallet manufacturers website to learn about the PIN delay and read the bad news: The delay doubled whenever a wrong PIN was entered. The website stated, The number of PIN entry failures is saved in the Trezors memory. This means that power cycling the Trezor wont make the wait time go to zero again.
The thief would have to sit his life off entering the PINs. Meanwhile, you've got enough time to move your funds into a new device or wallet out of the newspaper backup. (Trezor is located in Prague, hence the stilted English.) The difficulty was, I had been the thief, trying to steal my own bitcoins back from my Trezor.
Following my sixth incorrect PIN effort, creeping terror had escalated into heart-pounding panicI might have kissed my 7.4 bitcoins goodbye.I created a few more guesses, and every time I collapsed, my sense of unreality grew in proportion to the PIN delay, which was now 2,048 seconds, or about 34 minutes.
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One hundred guesses could take more than 80 sextillion years.I broke the news to Carla. I told her I couldnt recall the PIN and I was being punished each time I entered an incorrect PIN. She asked me if Id stored the PIN in my 1Password application (a protected password program ).
When she asked me why, I didnt have an answer.I knew it would be Bitcoin Account a mistake to squander a valuable guess in my agitated condition. My mind had become contaminated with scrambled permutations of PINs. I went into the kitchen to chop vegetables for a curry we had been making for dinner.
As I cut potatoes into cubes, I mentally shuffled around numbers as though they were Scrabble tiles on a stand. After a time, a number popped into my head: 55144545. That was it! I walked from the kitchen to the office. The Trezor still had a few hundred seconds left on the countdown timer.
I tapped in 55144545. Wrong PIN entered. Please wait 4,096 seconds to continueI barely slept that night. The little shuteye I managed to get was filled with nightmares involving combinations of the numbers 1, 4, and 5. It wasnt so much that the $8,000 that bothered meit was the pity I felt for being dumb enough to lose the paper and overlook the PIN.
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If I wasnt able to remember the PIN, the Trezor would taunt me for the rest of my life.The Hunt: April 5, 2017: 7.4 BTC $8,325That morning, bleary eyed, I started looking into methods to get my bitcoins back that didnt involve recalling my PIN or healing words. If Id lost my debit card PINI could contact my bank and Id eventually regain access to my funds.
