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TIFU by not backing up my bitcoin wallets well enough
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This happened today so quite literally TIFU...

Flash back to about 3 years ago when I was at my friend's house talking to his dad about bitcoin. He knew way more than I did at the time and he explained it to me. I majored in Computer Engineering and at the time I was maybe a Junior. When I got home that night I actually found old ASIC mining hardware for sale online affordable and just thought I'd like to have it sort of as a relic but even cooler if it worked and I could mine a little bitcoin - nothing too serious. Just a bitcoin mining hobbyist. I had no plan on starting a bitcoin farm or anything...

So over the last 3 years I've mined on an old Antminer S2 and actually have amassed about 0.35 bitcoins. In today's value that's about $5500 USD with the explosion of the popularity of bitcoin over the last 3 months or so. I wanted to cash out a little bit of that money and get myself some new computer parts or pay down some college debt so I went to my bitcoin wallet. Still able to log in - nice. Go to transfer my funds to an exchange that I can sell and put in my bank account... Here's where I begin to understand how I've fucked up...

To transfer funds out of the wallet it requires a WALLET password, which is different from the account password. Oh shit... I try all the usually combinations and nothing works. Now I'm annoyed because I already logged into the account AND used 2FA to verify I've not hacked the account or something so WHY do I need a password for each wallet? This is excessive security that's keeping me from my bitcoins. I remember though that I downloaded the PDF with the security keys on it. Unfortunately for me my hard drive went FUBAR about 4 or 5 months ago and right now the backup won't extract the files. All that comes out are blank files the same size as the original. (I highly suggest not using DriveImage XML. This is what messed up my life.)

I email the wallet site's support and they say they can attempt to hack the wallet with a service they work with. Basically i think they try and brute force the thing to get the wallet open... idk. But it will cost $100 for them to try. Not sure I want to pay someone to hack my wallet just yet so I'm still trying to recover the keys. Sage advice for anyone getting into bitcoin like I did... back up your keys in multiple places where a bum hard drive isn't going to keep you from them.

tl;dr: I had my keycards to recover my bitcoin wallets on my computer. Computer hard drive had to be backed up. That failed. So now I'm fighting with the wallet service to attempt to gain access to about $5500 in bitcoin that I've mined over the last 3 years.

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6 years ago