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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 get a better opinion, using my phone as a flashlight.Carla I asked.
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 said. Its a nuisance, thats all. Ill need to send each of the bitcoins from the Trezor into an online wallet, reinitialize the Trezor, generate a new word list, and put 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 good 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 newspaper. OK, its probably 554145. Wrong PIN entered.I looked in the tiny monochrome screen on the bitcoin wallet and noticed a countdown timer had seemed. It was making me wait a few seconds before I could try out another PIN.
I went to the hardware wallet manufacturers website to learn about the PIN delay and also read the bad 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 burglar would need to sit off his life entering the PINs. Meanwhile, you've got enough time to move your funds into a new device or wallet from the newspaper backup. (Trezor is based in Prague, hence the stilted English.) The difficulty was, I was the thief, trying to sneak my own bitcoins back from my Trezor.
Following my sixth incorrect PIN attempt, creeping terror had escalated to heart-pounding panicI may have kissed my Learn More 7.4 bitcoins goodbye.I created 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 would 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 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 why, I didnt have an answer.I knew it would be a mistake to waste a precious guess in my agitated condition. My mind had become polluted with scrambled Chinese Coins 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 workplace. The Trezor nevertheless 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 was 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 lose the newspaper and overlook the PIN.
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When I wasnt able to remember 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.
