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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 get a better view, using my phone for 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 garbage in a Los Angeles landfill.Carla asked if losing the newspaper was a large deal.Not actually, I stated. Its just a hassle, 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 place the bitcoins 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 should have made an error entering the PIN, I believed. I tried 551445 again, taking good care to enter the digits properly 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 consult with the newspaper. OK, its probably 554145. Wrong PIN entered.I looked in the tiny monochrome display on the bitcoin wallet and noticed a countdown timer had appeared. It was making me wait for a couple of seconds before I could try out another PIN.
I went to the hardware pocket manufacturers website to learn about the PIN delay and read the terrible 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 magically make the wait time proceed to zero again.
The thief would have to sit off his life entering the PINs. Meanwhile, you have enough time to transfer your funds into a new apparatus or wallet from 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 attempt, creeping terror had escalated to heart-pounding panicI might have kissed my 7.4 bitcoins goodbye.I created a couple more guesses, and each time I collapsed, my sense of unreality grew in proportion to the PIN delay, that was now 2,048 seconds, roughly 34 minutes.
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One hundred guesses could take 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 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 squander a precious guess in my condition. My mind had become contaminated with scrambled permutations of 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 time, a number popped into a knockout post my head: 55144545. This was it! I walked from the kitchen to the workplace. 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 little shuteye I managed to get was 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 lose the paper 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 Search: April 5, 2017: 7.4 BTC $8,325That morning, bleary eyed, I started looking into methods to get my bitcoins back that didnt involve recalling my PIN or healing words. If Id lost my debit card PIN, I could contact my bank and Id eventually regain access to my funds.
