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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 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 has been decomposing somewhere under a pile of crap in a Los Angeles landfill.Carla requested if losing the newspaper was a large deal.Not actually, '' I said. Its just a hassle, thats all. Ill have to send each of the bitcoins in 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 notebook and entered 551445. Wrong PIN entered.I must have made an error entering the PIN, I thought. I tried 551445 again, taking good care to enter the digits correctly this time.Wrong PIN entered.Uh oh. I tried 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 refer to the paper. OK, its likely 554145. Wrong PIN entered.I looked at the tiny monochrome display on the bitcoin wallet and noticed 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 bad news: The delay doubled whenever 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 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 transfer your funds into a new device or wallet out of 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.
Following my sixth incorrect PIN effort, creeping terror had escalated into heart-pounding panicI might have kissed my 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, which was now 2,048 seconds, roughly 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 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 squander a valuable guess in my condition. My mind had become 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 stand. After a while, a number popped Recommended Reading into my head: 55144545. That was it! I walked out of the kitchen to the office. The Trezor still 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 was filled with nightmares involving combinations of the numbers 1, 4, and 5. It wasnt so much that the 8,000 that troubled meit was the shame I felt for being dumb 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 remainder of my life.The Hunt: April 5, 2017: 7.4 BTC $8,325That morning, bleary eyed, I started looking into methods to receive my 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.
