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Shes been home more than a week and never said 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 opinion, using my phone as a flashlight.Carla I inquired.
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 requested if losing the newspaper proved to be a large deal.Not really, 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 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 notebook and entered 551445. Wrong PIN entered.I should have made an error entering the PIN, I believed. I tried 551445 again, taking care to enter the digits properly this time.Wrong PIN entered.Uh oh. I tried a slight variation: 554445Wrong PIN entered.This is ridiculous, I thought.
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Id entered it at least a dozen occasions in recent months without having to consult with the newspaper. OK, its probably 554145. Wrong PIN entered.I looked in 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 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 whenever a wrong PIN was entered. The website stated, 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 thief would need to sit his life off entering the PINs. Meanwhile, you've got enough time to move your funds into a new apparatus or wallet out of the newspaper backup. (Trezor is located in Prague, hence the stilted English.) The problem was, I had been the thief, trying to sneak my own bitcoins back in my Trezor.
Following my sixth incorrect PIN effort, creeping dread had escalated to heart-pounding panicI may have kissed my 7.4 bitcoins goodbye.I created a couple 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 would take more than 80 sextillion years.I broke the news to Carla. I told her I couldnt recall the PIN and that 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 , I didnt have an answer.I knew it would be a mistake to waste a precious guess in my agitated condition. My mind was becoming polluted with scrambled permutations of all 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 like they were Scrabble tiles on a stand. After a time, a number popped into my mind: 55144545. This was it! I walked from the kitchen to the office. The Trezor still had a couple hundred seconds left special info 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 has been 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 eliminate the paper and overlook the PIN.
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When I wasnt able to recall 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 recovery words. If Id lost my debit card PIN, I could contact my bank and Id eventually regain access to my funds.
