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Shes been home more than a week and never said 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 find a better opinion, using my phone as a flashlight.Carla I inquired.
Nothing but egg cartons, espresso grinds, and Amazon boxes. The orange part of paper was decomposing somewhere under a pile of crap in a Los Angeles landfill.Carla requested if losing the paper proved to be a big deal.Not actually, I stated. Its a hassle, thats all. Ill need to send all the bitcoins in the Trezor to 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 must 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 small variation: 554445Wrong PIN entered.This is ridiculous, I thought.
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Id entered it at least a dozen occasions in recent months without having to consult with this paper. OK, its likely 554145. Wrong PIN entered.I looked in the tiny monochrome screen 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 to the hardware wallet manufacturers site to learn about the PIN delay and also read the bad news: The delay doubled every time a wrong PIN was entered. The site said, The number of PIN entry failures is stored in the Trezors memory. This means that power cycling the Trezor wont magically 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 move your funds into a new device or wallet from the paper backup. (Trezor is based in Prague, hence the stilted English.) The difficulty was, I was the thief, trying to sneak my own bitcoins back in my Trezor.
Following my sixth incorrect PIN effort, 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 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 could take more than 80 sextillion years.I broke the news to Carla. I told her I couldnt remember article the PIN and that I was being punished each time that I entered an incorrect PIN. She asked me if Id saved the PIN in my 1Password application (a protected 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 condition. My mind was becoming 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 time, a number popped into my head: 55144545. That was it! I walked out of 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 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 bothered meit was the pity I felt for being stupid enough to eliminate the newspaper and forget the PIN.
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When I wasnt able to recall 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 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.
