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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 find a better opinion, using my phone for a flashlight.Carla I asked.
Nothing but egg cartons, espresso grinds, and Amazon boxes. The orange piece of paper was decomposing somewhere under a pile of crap in a Los Angeles landfill.Carla asked if losing the paper proved to be a big deal.Not really, I said. Its a nuisance, thats all. Ill need to send each of the bitcoins from the Trezor to an online wallet, reinitialize the Trezor, generate a new word list, and put 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 thought. I attempted 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 occasions in recent months without having to consult with this newspaper. OK, its likely 554145. Wrong PIN entered.I looked in the tiny monochrome display on the bitcoin wallet and noticed 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 pocket manufacturers site to learn about the PIN delay and read the bad news: The delay doubled whenever a wrong PIN has been 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 thief would need to sit his life off entering the PINs. Meanwhile, you've got enough time to move 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 was the thief, trying to sneak my own bitcoins back in my Trezor.
After my sixth incorrect PIN attempt, creeping dread had escalated to heart-pounding panicI might have kissed my 7.4 bitcoins goodbye.I made a few more guesses, and every time that I collapsed, 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 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 each 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 would be a mistake to squander a valuable guess in my agitated condition. My mind had become contaminated with scrambled permutations of 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 from 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 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 remainder of my life.The Search: April 5, 2017: 7.4 BTC $8,325That morning, bleary eyed, I started looking into ways to get 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.
