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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 find a better opinion, using my phone for 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 crap in a Los Angeles landfill.Carla asked if losing the newspaper proved to be a large deal.Not really, I stated. Its a nuisance, 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 laptop 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 correctly this time.Wrong PIN entered.Uh oh. I attempted 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 likely 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 couple of seconds before I could try another PIN.
I went into the hardware wallet manufacturers site to learn about the PIN delay and read the terrible news: The delay doubled every time a wrong PIN was entered. The site stated, The number of PIN entry failures is stored in the Trezors memory. This means that power cycling the Trezor wont magically make the wait time go to zero again.
The thief would need to sit off his life entering the PINs. Meanwhile, you've got enough time to transfer your funds into a new device or wallet from the paper backup. (Trezor is located in Prague, hence the stilted English.) The difficulty was, I was the thief, trying to sneak my own bitcoins back from my Trezor.
After my sixth incorrect PIN effort, creeping terror had escalated into heart-pounding panicI their explanation might have kissed my 7.4 bitcoins goodbye.I created a couple more guesses, and every time that 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 require more than 80 sextillion years.I broke the news to Carla. I told her I couldnt remember the PIN and that I was being punished every time that I entered an incorrect PIN. She asked me if Id stored the PIN in my 1Password application (a secure password app).
When she asked me , I didnt have an answer.I knew it'd be a mistake to waste a valuable guess in my agitated condition. My mind had become polluted with scrambled permutations of all 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 while, a number popped into my mind: 55144545. This was it! I walked out of the kitchen to the workplace. 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 small 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 bothered meit was the shame I felt for being dumb enough to eliminate the paper and forget the PIN.
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When I wasnt able to remember the PIN, the Trezor would taunt me to the click over here rest of my life.The Hunt: April 5, 2017: 7.4 BTC $8,325That morning, bleary eyed, I started looking into ways to get my own 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.
