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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 view, using my phone as a flashlight.Carla I inquired.
Nothing but egg cartons, espresso grinds, and Amazon boxes. The orange piece of paper was decomposing somewhere under a pile of crap in a Los Angeles landfill.Carla requested if losing the newspaper was a large deal.Not really, I said. Its just a hassle, thats all. Ill have to send each of the bitcoins from the Trezor into 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 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 ridiculous, I thought.
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Id entered it at least a dozen occasions in recent months without having to consult with this 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 seemed. It was making me wait for a few seconds before I could try out another PIN.
I went into the hardware wallet manufacturers website to learn about the PIN delay and 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 stored in the Trezors memory. This means that power cycling the Trezor wont magically make the wait time proceed to zero again.
The thief would need to sit his life off entering the PINs. Meanwhile, you have enough time to transfer 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 into heart-pounding panicI may have kissed my 7.4 bitcoins goodbye.I created a few more guesses, and every time I collapsed, my sense of unreality grew more information in proportion to the PIN delay, which 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 every time I entered an incorrect PIN. She asked me if Id saved the PIN in my 1Password application (a protected 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 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 rack. After a time, a number popped Learn More into my mind: 55144545. This 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 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 troubled 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 recall 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 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.
