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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 find a better view, using my phone for a flashlight.Carla I asked.
Nothing but egg cartons, espresso grinds, and Amazon boxes. The orange part of paper was decomposing somewhere under a pile of crap in a Los Angeles landfill.Carla asked if losing the newspaper was a big deal.Not actually, '' I said. Its just 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 place 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 thought. I tried 551445 again, taking good care to enter the digits properly this time.Wrong PIN entered.Uh oh. I tried a slight 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 consult with the paper. OK, its probably 554145. Wrong PIN entered.I looked in the tiny monochrome screen on the bitcoin wallet and noticed that a countdown timer had appeared. It was making me wait a couple of seconds before I could try another PIN.
I went into the hardware wallet manufacturers site to learn about the PIN delay and also read the terrible news: The delay doubled every time a wrong PIN has been entered. The site said, The number of PIN entry failures is saved in the Trezors memorycard. This means that power cycling the Trezor wont magically make the wait time go to zero again.
The burglar would have to sit off his life 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 difficulty was, I had been the thief, trying to steal my own bitcoins back from my Trezor.
After my sixth incorrect PIN attempt, creeping terror had escalated into heart-pounding panicI might have kissed my 7.4 bitcoins goodbye.I made a few more guesses, and every time I collapsed, my sense of unreality grew in proportion to the PIN delay, that 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 remember the PIN check it out 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 squander a precious guess in my condition. My mind had become polluted with scrambled permutations of PINs. I went into the kitchen to chop veggies for a curry we had been making for dinner.
As I cut potatoes into cubes, I mentally shuffled around numbers like they were Scrabble tiles on a stand. After a time, a number popped into my head: 55144545. This was it! I walked out of 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 have has been full of nightmares involving combinations of the numbers 1, 4, and 5. It wasnt so much the 8,000 that troubled meit was the pity I felt for being stupid enough to lose the newspaper and forget the PIN.
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If I wasnt able to remember the PIN, the Trezor would taunt me to 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 own bitcoins back that didnt involve recalling my PIN or healing words. If Discover More Id lost my debit Click Here card PINI could contact my bank and Id eventually regain access to my funds.
