The Cloud Mining Bitcoin Diaries
Shes been home more than a week and never said 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 find a better view, using my phone as a flashlight.Carla I asked.
Nothing but egg cartons, espresso grinds, and Amazon boxes. The orange piece of paper was decomposing somewhere under a pile of garbage in a Los Angeles landfill.Carla asked if losing the paper proved to be a big deal.Not actually, I stated. Its a nuisance, thats all. Ill have to send all the bitcoins from the Trezor to an online wallet, reinitialize the Trezor, generate a new word list, and place the bitcoins 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 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 times in recent months without having to refer to the paper. OK, its likely 554145. Wrong PIN entered.I looked at the tiny monochrome screen on the bitcoin wallet and noticed that a countdown timer had appeared. It was making me wait for a couple of seconds before I could try out another PIN.
I went to the hardware pocket manufacturers website to learn about the PIN delay and read the bad news: The delay doubled every time a wrong PIN has been entered. The site stated, 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 proceed to zero again.
The burglar would need to sit his life off entering the PINs. Meanwhile, you have enough time to move your funds into a new device or wallet out of the paper backup. (Trezor is based in Prague, hence the stilted English.) The problem was, I had been the thief, trying to sneak my own bitcoins back from my Trezor.
After my sixth incorrect PIN effort, creeping terror had escalated to heart-pounding panicI might have kissed my 7.4 bitcoins goodbye.I created a few more guesses, and each time that I collapsed, my news sense of unreality grew in proportion to the PIN delay, that was now 2,048 seconds, roughly 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 saved the PIN in my 1Password application (a protected password app).
When she asked me why, I didnt have an answer.I knew it would be a mistake to squander a precious guess in my condition. My mind was becoming polluted with scrambled permutations of all 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 as though they were Scrabble tiles on a rack. After a while, a number popped into my mind: 55144545. That was it! I walked from the kitchen to the office. The Trezor nevertheless 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 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 stupid enough to eliminate the paper and forget the PIN.
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If I wasnt able to remember the PIN, the Trezor would taunt me to the remainder of my life.The Hunt: April 5, 2017: 7.4 BTC $8,325That morning, bleary eyed, I started looking into ways to receive 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 linked here regain access to my funds.
