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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 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 requested if losing the newspaper was a big deal.Not actually, '' I stated. Its just a hassle, thats all. Ill have to send each of the bitcoins from 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 attempted 551445 again, taking care to enter the digits correctly this time.Wrong PIN entered.Uh oh. I tried 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 this paper. OK, its probably 554145. Wrong PIN entered.I looked in the tiny monochrome screen on the bitcoin wallet and noticed that a countdown timer had seemed. It was making me wait 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 bad news: The delay doubled whenever a wrong PIN was entered. The website said, The number of PIN entry failures is saved in the Trezors memorycard. This means that power cycling the Trezor wont make the wait time go to zero again.
The burglar would have to sit his life off entering the PINs. Meanwhile, you have enough time to transfer your funds into a new apparatus or wallet from the newspaper backup. (Trezor is based in Prague, hence the stilted English.) The difficulty was, I had been the thief, trying to steal my own bitcoins back in 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 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 would take more than 80 sextillion years.I broke the news to Carla. I told her I couldnt recall the PIN and I was being punished every time I entered an incorrect PIN. She asked me if Id saved the PIN in my 1Password application (a secure password program ).
When she asked me why, I didnt have an answer.I knew it would be a mistake to waste a valuable guess in my agitated condition. My mind had become polluted with scrambled permutations of PINs. I went into the kitchen to chop vegetables for a curry we were 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 into my head: 55144545. That was it! I walked from the kitchen to the office. 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 find this slept that news night. The small shuteye I managed to have has been filled with nightmares involving combinations of the numbers 1, 4, and 5. It wasnt so much 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 remember 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 ways to get 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.
