The Of Chinese Coins
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 get a better view, using my phone as a flashlight.Carla I inquired.
Nothing but egg cartons, espresso grinds, and Amazon boxes. The orange piece of paper has been decomposing somewhere under a pile of crap in a Los Angeles landfill.Carla asked if losing the newspaper proved to be a large deal.Not really, 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 laptop and entered 551445. Wrong PIN entered.I must have made an error entering the PIN, I thought. 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 paper. OK, its probably 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 for 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 site stated, The number of PIN entry failures is saved in the Trezors memory. This means that power cycling the Trezor wont magically make the wait time go to zero again.
The burglar would need 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 Clicking Here in Prague, hence the stilted English.) The difficulty was, I had been the thief, trying to steal my own bitcoins back in my Trezor.
Following my sixth incorrect PIN effort, creeping dread had escalated into heart-pounding panicI may have kissed my 7.4 bitcoins goodbye.I made a few more guesses, and each time that I failed, my sense of unreality grew in proportion to the PIN delay, which was now 2,048 seconds, roughly 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 I was being punished every time I entered an incorrect PIN. She asked me if Id stored the PIN in my 1Password application (a protected password app).
When she asked me , I didnt have an answer.I knew it'd be a mistake to squander a precious guess in my 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 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 small shuteye I managed to have has been full of nightmares involving combinations of the numbers 1, 4, and 5. It wasnt so much that the 8,000 that bothered meit was the pity I felt for being stupid enough to lose the newspaper and forget the PIN.
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If I wasnt able to recall 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 methods 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.
