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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 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 garbage in a Los Angeles landfill.Carla asked if losing the paper proved to be a big deal.Not really, I stated. Its a hassle, thats all. Ill have to send each of the bitcoins in the Trezor to an online wallet, reinitialize the Trezor, generate a new word list, and put 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 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 ridiculous, I thought.
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Id entered it at least a dozen occasions in recent months without having to consult with the paper. OK, its likely 554145. Wrong PIN entered.I looked at the tiny monochrome display on the bitcoin wallet and noticed that a countdown timer had seemed. It was making me wait a few seconds before I could try another PIN.
I went into the hardware pocket manufacturers site to learn about the PIN delay and also read the terrible 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 memory. This means that power cycling the Trezor wont magically make the wait time go to zero again.
The thief would have to sit his life off entering the PINs. Meanwhile, you've got enough time to move your funds into a new device or wallet out of 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 may have directory 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, that was now 2,048 seconds, or about 34 minutes.
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One hundred guesses could 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 program ).
When she asked me , I didnt have an answer.I knew it'd be a mistake to squander a precious guess in my agitated condition. My mind had become polluted 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 while, a number popped into my head: 55144545. That was it! I walked from the kitchen into the workplace. 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 small shuteye I managed to get was full of 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 dumb enough to lose the paper and forget the PIN.
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If I wasnt able to remember the PIN, the Trezor would taunt me to the rest of my life.The Search: 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 recovery words. If Id lost my debit card PINI could contact my bank and Id eventually regain access to my funds.
