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Shes been home more than a week and never mentioned anything 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 opinion, using my phone as a flashlight.Carla I asked.
Nothing but egg cartons, espresso grinds, and Amazon boxes. The orange piece of paper has been decomposing somewhere under a pile of crap in a Los Angeles landfill.Carla asked if losing the paper proved to be a large deal.Not really, '' I said. Its a nuisance, thats all. Ill have to send each of the bitcoins from 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 notebook and entered 551445. Wrong PIN entered.I must have made an error entering the PIN, I thought. I attempted 551445 again, taking 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 occasions in recent months without having to refer to this paper. OK, its likely 554145. Wrong PIN entered.I looked at the tiny monochrome display on the bitcoin wallet and noticed a countdown timer had appeared. It was making me wait for a few seconds before I could try out another PIN.
I went to the hardware pocket manufacturers site to learn about the PIN delay and read the terrible news: The delay doubled every time a wrong PIN was entered. The website said, The number of PIN entry failures is stored in the Trezors memorycard. This means that power cycling the Trezor wont make the wait time go to zero again.
The burglar would need 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 based in Prague, hence the stilted English.) The problem was, I had been the thief, trying to steal my own bitcoins back from my Trezor.
Following my sixth incorrect PIN attempt, creeping dread had escalated into heart-pounding panicI may have kissed my 7.4 bitcoins goodbye.I made a few more guesses, and every time that I failed, my sense of unreality grew in proportion to the PIN delay, which was now 2,048 seconds, roughly 34 minutes.
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One hundred guesses would require more than 80 sextillion years.I broke the news to Carla. I told her I couldnt remember the PIN and I was being punished every time I entered an incorrect PIN. She asked me if Id stored the PIN in my 1Password application (a secure password program ).
When she asked me why, I didnt have an answer.I knew it'd be a mistake to waste a valuable guess in my agitated condition. My mind was becoming polluted with scrambled permutations of PINs. I went into the kitchen to chop veggies for a curry we were making for dinner.
As I cut potatoes into cubes, I mentally shuffled around numbers as though they were Scrabble tiles on a rack. After a time, a number popped into my head: 55144545. This was it! I walked out of the kitchen to the workplace. The Trezor still had a couple 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 have has been full of nightmares involving combinations of the numbers 1, 4, and 5. It wasnt so much that the 8,000 that troubled meit was the shame 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 ways to receive my bitcoins back that didnt involve recalling my PIN or recovery words. If Id lost my debit card PINI could contact my bank and Id eventually regain access to my funds.
