In 2013 a guy in Newport threw out a hard drive with thousands of coins on it, and he has spent over a decade fighting for permission to dig up a landfill. Another guy has 7,002 BTC sitting on an IronKey with two password guesses left. Those are the famous ones. The rest of us just have quieter versions of the same story.
Another hardware wallet advisory hit the front page this morning, which is what got me thinking about it.
The dead laptop nobody backed up. The "temporary" wallet that stayed temporary for three years. The seed written down at 2am with two words in the wrong order. The drive that vanished during a move and turned up in a box of cables six months later.
So let's hear them:
– What happened?
– How long did you think it was gone?
– Did you get it back, and what finally worked?
– What did you change afterwards?
No judgement here. Most of us learned self custody the expensive way. Keep it general though, and please don't post anything that describes your current setup.
https://i.redd.it/zm92xrvpzuoh1.jpeg
Posted by Objective_Basil_8414
4 Comments
that image is basically a visual of my anxiety, just a platter and an arm and all those nights i woke up in a cold sweat
lost a wallet from 2015 that i’d tossed a few hundred into and forgot about, thought it was on an external drive that got corrupted. spent forty hours across two weeks running recovery tools on that thing, nothing worked. six months later i’m cleaning out a drawer and find an old phone i’d used for a month before the screen shattered, plugged it in on a whim and there it was, mycelium still running with the balance showing. i just stared at the wall for a solid five minutes
now my seed is stamped into metal and stashed in two separate locations, one of them being my mom’s safety deposit box that she has zero clue what it’s for
Wrote down my cold wallet seed phrases, hid them in a certain decorative feature in the house, and then was unable to find said decorative feature for days after a house move. Heart-dropping moment; thankfully, I found them and now keep multiple copies (safely hidden, of course). Thankfully, that’s the closest I’ve come to losing my crypto. Though I was somewhat confident I would find it, I definitely shit myself. Stay safe with your keys guys.
Actually the BlockFi bankruptcy. I withdrew my BTC like 2-3 weeks before the website shut down. Divine intervention.
I was running a restaurant and sold all my BTC to pay the rent; afterwards, I was never able to buy back the same amount. My biggest regret ever.