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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 part of paper was decomposing somewhere under a pile of garbage in a Los Angeles landfill.Carla asked if losing the newspaper was a large deal.Not really, '' I stated. Its just a nuisance, thats all. Ill have to send all 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 should have made an error entering the PIN, I thought. I tried 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 the newspaper. 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 for a couple of seconds before I could try another PIN.
I went into the hardware wallet manufacturers website to learn about the PIN delay and also read the terrible news: The delay doubled whenever a wrong PIN has been 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 proceed to zero again.
The burglar would need to additional reading sit off his life entering the PINs. Meanwhile, you have enough time to move your funds into a new apparatus or wallet out of the paper backup. (Trezor is located in Prague, hence the stilted English.) The problem was, I had been the thief, trying to sneak my own bitcoins back in 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 couple more guesses, and every time that I failed, my sense of unreality grew in proportion to the PIN delay, which 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 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 would be a mistake to waste a precious 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 were 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 time, a number popped into my head: 55144545. That was it! I walked out of the kitchen into 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 slept that night. The little 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 pity I felt for being dumb enough to lose the newspaper and overlook the PIN.
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If 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 bitcoins back that didnt involve recalling my PIN or healing words. If Id lost my debit card PINI could contact my bank and Id eventually regain access to my funds.
