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mikestantonn · 5 years

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This is who I am: 9 months later

As always, I don’t really know where to begin with these. Hell, I’ve been writing this for what seems like a week at this point. As much as I want to tell people how I feel, the words are really never there when I need them. But I’ll try again, and hopefully whoever reads this will understand.

I won’t go into to much detail about what happened here but shortly after making that post, I lost my therapist due to incorrect info given to me by my health insurance and by my therapist somehow not knowing my insurance wouldn’t cover my visits even though they said it would. I was only a few months into therapy (seeing my first therapist ever too!), and at the time, it felt like the biggest drawback ever. So for most of the spring and summer of 2018, I didn’t see anyone again. I told myself it wasn’t meant to be by telling myself lies that “I didn’t need it” or “I learned enough to do it on my own”, not realizing that would be one of the biggest mistakes I will probably ever make in my life.

The thing about therapy for those of you who never had it (Mind you this could just be my experience with therapy), is that it peels away at the layers of your psyche. Your logic, your emotions, your fears, everything. To the uninitiated, it sounds scary, and that’s because a lot of the time, it fucking is! It was horrifying to me. Just getting there felt like I was strapped to a boulder, trying to claw my way to the door of their office. When you’re in the shape that I was, that I still am, your mind tries to come up with every excuse not to do anything, especially when it comes to life changing events. This part of my body was in high alert. I had to fight myself the whole way, week after week just to go.

After awhile it got easier, as most things do with time. Most of the time I spent with this therapist was stripping away the layers. We talked about my home life, work, relationships, my childhood, high school, my parents, their divorce, dealing with my grandparents deaths, my social interactions, my interests, my dreams, everything! Nothing was off the table. It’s a double edged sword. It’s good to get these things off your chest, but at the same time, you have to bring the truth to light, even if it’s things you never wanted to remember again. I would try to hold it together during sessions, but usually once I got to my car, I would start crying. But I knew it was in a way, necessary. I need to bring these things to light in order to work on them. But just as we started getting into the nitty gritty, I lost my therapist. The worst part about it was that I didn’t know how to handle all this emotions we were pulling out, and with the fact that I tend to hold on to everything and can’t let anything go, it made my anxiety worse. I screwed up not seeing a therapist again right away and in the process set myself back further than I was before I started therapy.

It took about 3-5 months (The timeframe seems foggy to me. So much happened in 2018) before I saw another therapist again. People kept telling me I needed to go but I didn’t listen. I was so deep into my own bullshit that I was falling apart. On the outside, the shell of myself that I’ve built around me over the years gave off the impression that I was fine. Nothing looked like it was wrong. But under that shell, I was a storm of negative emotions. Unfortunately this wouldn’t be the worst of that storm. I started seeing a therapist again back in August and still to this day, I see her every Thursday. It’s been really helpful so far but we didn’t really start cracking the surface until about a month or so ago. And it’s opened an even bigger Pandora’s box than what I was dealing with when I was working with my previous therapist. I thought I use to understand the saying “Sometimes you have to fall apart in order to fall back together again” but this experience has given it a whole new meaning to me.

When you’ve told yourself lies in order to “protect” yourself, it becomes one of the hardest mental tasks unpacking these lies to bring out the truth. The truth is, I really don’t like myself. I almost hate the person I’ve become. It’s hard to even write this part because my reaction is to lie and say I don’t but I do. I’m learning to love myself but right now, I don’t feel like I have any redeeming qualities. People, including my therapist, tell me that I’m a sweet, kind, person but I don’t feel it anymore. It feels like a flaw. I feel like I’ve let people walk all over me my whole life. I use to have a voice but not anymore. I’m too afraid to tell people what I want. I feel like I’m going to push everyone away if my wants contradict theirs. So I follow everyone else and keep my mouth shut. I don’t speak up, I don’t defend myself when being wronged, I don’t do anything. I just internalize it and it becomes this clusterfuck of negative thoughts in my head.

So why am I writing and sharing about all of this? In a way, I guess it makes me feel better. It’s hard to share this because I feel like people don’t care nor do they understand. In this day and age, it still feels like talking about your feelings is a weakness. That it just gives assholes more fodder to talk shit about you. But as hard as it is, it in some ways makes me feel better. It feels like a weight is off my chest putting this out into the world instead of internalizing it. I really don’t expect anyone to even read this, let alone reply to it. It just feels good in a way to share it and to think that whoever does read it might understand what people like me go through, fighting yourself mentally, physically, and emotionally just to get from one day to the next.

This past year has had its great moments, some of which were my favorite so far in this life of mine, but the vast majority of this past year has been one of the toughest years I’ve ever had. Probably one of my least favorite years I’ve ever lived. Right now, I feel like I’m at the lowest point I’ve ever been in my life. It feels like true rock bottom for me. So I plan to make this year one of the best I’ve ever had! Now this isn’t one of those “New Year, New Me” things. I just want to make this year the best because I hope by the time December 31st, 2019 rolls around, that I will be better in some way than I was 365 days before, and that it will continue to get better beyond that. There’s a lot at stake going into this year and beyond. I have a lot to work on to make my life the way I’ve always dreamed. I just hope that when I’m living this future, I’ll be happier than I am right now.

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sending-the-message · 6 years

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Fifty Shades of Purple by ByfelsDisciple

I loved the bruises the best.

My vulnerable, otherwise-pasty ass cheek would blossom a purple smear, like a dollop of blueberry compote on crème fraiche. It had to be just one side, though, so I could put my weight onto the other while I sat. It would force me to squirm on a constant basis. That, in turn, reminded me of just how wet I was as my panty-less thighs slid against one another beneath my skirt. It makes the workday so much more bearable.

The bruises would remind me of the night before. The spanking. The choking. Nearly blacking out in pursuit of that fourth climax.

I love cumming to the thought of making Christian Grey blush.

There is nothing on this earth – no drug, no experience, not laughter of an innocent baby, nothing – that can compare to the euphoria of a perfect BDSM session. When I’m locked naked in a cage with my legs spread painfully wide and ropes so tight that I lose feeling in my hands and feet, I know I’m alive. Those are the moments that make the rest of my existence worthwhile.

“You’re a masochist, Rebecca,” my coworkers would say when I took on yet another client despite working fifty-hour weeks.

They thought it was hyperbole. It wasn’t.

My husband and I weren’t a match made in heaven. No couple is. But we were a match. You know you’ve found someone special when your weirdness is their kink.

Byron had his flaws. We all do. And God knows I’m the more attractive one. But marriage is based on the fact that you’re willing to share space with someone every goddamn day from now until our beating heart says “fuck it, I’m out.”

That may sound cynical, but it is a truly amazing thing.

Never underestimate just how much more palatable the world can be when you’ve got regular heavy bondage sessions to blow off some steam.

“Gotta head out,” Byron said with a meek smile. He pushed his Coke-bottle glasses up his nose, threw on his backpack, kissed me on the forehead, and turned around.

I pouted.

He sensed this, and stopped in the doorframe without turning around. He sighed. “I’m not abandoning you, Rebecca.”

I stayed silent.

“I know it doesn’t seem fair. I know you want to release the demons of your day.” He turned around to face me and smiled sadly. “You’ll just have to be patient.”

He left before I could say anything further. I was irritated and he was selfish because we were both annoyingly human. But seriously, how rich and self-centered do you have to be if you expect house calls for electronic installation and wiring at all hours of the night? Sure, Byron got paid obscene amounts of money to be their go-to guy.

But SOME things should be off limits. Where do we end up when there are no boundaries?

Fine. Call me petty. But I had a point to prove.

I was fighting with Byron more and more about how many nights I went to bed alone. I would get so frustrated when he wouldn’t listen to my points. One of the things I love most about being a lawyer is the fact that the other side has to listen to me build my case, even when I know I’m wrong. Was it so bad to want that from my husband as well?

So I built my case. I recorded every single fucking day that I went to bed alone. Next time he said “there’s no way it’s THAT many,” I would whip out my calendar and show him just how lonely he made me feel.

Thursday, August 31st. Tuesday, September 5th. Friday, September 8th. Tuesday, September 12th. Saturday, September 16th. Tuesday, September 19 – 13 hours alone that time. Then they got more frequent. September 25th, 27th, and 29th – a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday all in one week. Monday, October 2nd and Tuesday, October 3rd (he was scheduled to leave that night) would BOTH be spent on the clock.

“Tell me, Rebecca,” he huffed angrily at me when I showed him the list. “Is it ALL about the sex, or do you miss me even a little?”

I had a delicate choice between acting indignant at such and accusation, and being soft and comforting after seeing that I’d hurt him. I wanted him, needed him to work for it, so I reluctantly selected ‘indignant.’

“You’re calling me superficial when you leave your wife alone for money?” I huffed, trying to stand taller than my 5’ 2” frame.

He pulled his hair. I was really getting to him. Good.

“Why do you get so fucking needy sometimes, Becca? Why? Why can’t I leave the house without feeling like the world’s worst husband? Are you going to get murdered? Is that it? Will a serial killer come to this house, on the one night you’re alone, and leave me with a lifetime of regret?”

I sighed. I hated to admit it when I was in the heat of an argument, but the “lifetime of regret” line just got to me. Byron has a way of doing that, though I’m sure he doesn’t understand how.

I hugged him and nuzzled his neck. He looked down at me in utter confusion, but knew better than to fuck things up by asking why.

The issue was still there, though, just under the surface. Some things can’t be beaten into submission.

I was watching the news, alone once again, last night. I was antsy. It had been two days since a session with Byron, and I couldn’t sleep. Porn just didn’t do it for me anymore. Ever since my first trip to Le Chef d’Homme, I’ve never been able to eat at McDonald’s again; it’s the same feeling with porn. I need something more decadent.

I was only half-listening to the news in my agitated state. But half was enough.

“-Richmond Strangler still eludes detectives. Police say that the man is likely in his late thirties, very highly intelligent, probably Caucasian. The homicides appear to be tied into extremely violent sexual fantasies that the killer has increasing difficulty in satiating. His victims are sexually assaulted in ways too brutal for us to describe on the air – though detectives point out that it usually takes hours for them to die.”

My stomach turned slightly.

“Police are looking to the public this evening to help catch a killer who leaves few clues behind. There have been eleven separate attacks. Anybody with any information is urged to come forward. Investigators ask all Richmond residents to try to recall any suspicious activities on or around the following dates:”

A list of dates scrolled up the screen and I froze.

August 31

September 5

September 8

September 12

September 16

September 19

Without realizing it, I began to mouth the dates as they were named.

September 25

September 27

September 29

October 1

October 2

I nearly cried with relief when I saw that the final dates were different. It couldn’t have been. I was crazy to think so.

“Sorry to interrupt, Tammy, but we’re getting word that the last dates were incorrect; this news is developing as we speak, and information is constantly being updated. It was actually October second and third – that’s yesterday and another attack just this evening.” The newscaster wrinkled his brown in concern, but his neatly-parted hair remained still.

“Thanks, Kent,” Tammy said with a Barbie smile. “Sorry folks. That last day was the Third.”

The Third.

I would say that I cried myself to sleep last night, but it would be a lie. I cried and stayed awake.

It’s nearly morning. I don’t know what to do. Byron should be home soon. I can’t confront him. I won’t call the police. I could run away, but – then what? Assume a new identity? Throw away my whole life based on speculation?

Or get Byron in trouble? What if he goes to prison and I’m wrong? What if he goes to prison and I’m right? What if he’s exonerated, I was wrong, and he comes home? How could I live with myself?

What if he’s cleared of all wrongdoing, but I was right? What would happened to me?

How many bruises would he inflict before I died?

#reddit #nosleep #scary #story

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josidel · 7 years

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EPIC TALE OF LOSING $30,000 IN BITCOIN

January 2016, I spent $3,000 to buy 7.4 bitcoins. At the time, it seemed an entirely worthwhile thing to do. I had recently started working as a research director at the Institute for the Future’s Blockchain Futures Lab, and I wanted firsthand experience with bitcoin, a cryptocurrency that uses a blockchain to record transactions on its network. I had no way of knowing that this transaction would lead to a white-knuckle scramble to avoid losing a small fortune.

My experiments with bitcoin were fascinating. It was surprisingly easy to buy stuff with the cryptocurrency. I used the airBitz app to buy Starbucks credit. I used Purse.io to buy a wireless security camera doorbell from Amazon. I used bitcoin at Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles to buy graphic novels.

November, bitcoin’s value had nearly doubled since January and was continuing to increase almost daily. My cryptocurrency stash was starting to turn into some real money. I’d been keeping my bitcoin keys on a web-based wallet, but I wanted to move them to a more secure place. Many online bitcoin services retain their customers’ private bitcoin keys, which means the accounts are vulnerable to hackers and fraudsters (remember the time Mt. Gox lost 850,000 bitcoins from its customers’ accounts in 2014?) or governments (like the time BTC-e, a Russian bitcoin exchange, had its domain seized by US District Court for New Jersey in August, freezing the assets of its users).

I interviewed a handful of bitcoin experts, and they all told me that that safest way to protect your cache was to use something called a “hardware wallet.” This little device is basically a glorified USB memory stick that stores your private bitcoin keys and allows you to authorize transactions without exposing those keys to the internet, where they could be seized by bad actors. I settled on a hardware wallet called the Trezor (the Czech word for “safe”), described by the manufacturer as “bulletproof.” I bought one on November 22 for $100 on Amazon (again, via Purse.io).

When the Trezor arrived, I plugged it into my computer and went to the Trezor website to set it up. The gadget’s little monochrome screen (the size of my two thumbnails, side by side) came to life, displaying a padlock icon. The website instructed me to write down 24 words, randomly generated by the Trezor one word at a time. The words were like “aware,” “move,” “fashion,” and “bitter.” I wrote them on a piece of orange paper. Next, I was prompted to create a PIN. I wrote it down (choosing a couple of short number combinations I was familiar with and could easily recall) on the same piece of paper as the 24-word list.

The Trezor website explained that these 24 words were my recovery words and could be used to generate the master private key to my bitcoin. If I lost my Trezor or it stopped working, I could recover my bitcoin by entering those 24 words into a new Trezor or any one of the many other hardware and online wallets that use the same standard key-generation algorithm. It was important for me to keep the paper hidden and safe, because anyone could use it to steal my 7.4 bitcoins. I transferred my currency from my web-based wallet to my Trezor, tossing both the Trezor and the orange piece of paper into a desk drawer in my home office. My plan was to buy a length of flat aluminum stock and letterpunch the 24 words onto it, then store it somewhere safe. I was going to do it right after the holidays.

The Mistake:

It was 6:30 in the morning. My 14-year-old daughter, Jane, was in London on a school trip, and my older daughter, Sarina, was at college in Colorado. My wife Carla and I were getting ready to leave for the airport to take a vacation in Tokyo. As I was rummaging through my desk drawer for a phone charger, I saw the orange piece of paper with the recovery words and PIN. What should I do with this? If our plane plowed into the ocean, I’d want my daughters to be able to get the bitcoins. The coins had already nearly tripled in value since I bought them, and I could imagine them being worth $50,000 one day. I took a pen and wrote on the paper:

Jane, if anything happens, show this paper to Cory. He’ll know what to do with it. Love, Dad

(“Cory” is Cory Doctorow, my friend and business partner at my website, Boing Boing. He’s not a bitcoin enthusiast, but I knew he’d be able to figure out how to retrieve the master private key from the word list.)

I took the paper into Jane’s bedroom, stuck it under her pillow, and we took a Lyft to LAX.

The Garbage:

We returned from Tokyo on March 24, and I didn’t even think about the orange piece of paper until April 4, when I remembered that I’d put it under Jane’s pillow. That’s funny, I thought. She’s been home more than a week and never said anything to me about it.

I went into her room and looked under her pillow. It wasn’t there. I looked under her bed, dragging out the storage boxes to get a better view, using my phone as a flashlight.

“Carla?” I asked. “Did you see that orange piece of paper with my bitcoin password on it? I can’t find it in Jane’s room.”

“Maybe Jane put it in her desk,” she said. Jane was in school, but I texted and asked her. She said she never saw an orange piece of paper.

“Wait,” Carla said. “We had the house cleaned while we were gone. I’ll call them.”

Carla called the cleaning service we’d used and got the woman who cleaned the house on the line. She told Carla that she did indeed remember finding the orange piece of paper.

“Where is it?” Carla asked.

“I threw it away.”

I knew the garbage had already been collected, but I put on a pair of nitrile gloves and went through the outside trash and recycling bins anyway. Nothing but egg cartons, espresso grinds, and Amazon boxes. The orange piece of paper was decomposing somewhere under a pile of garbage in a Los Angeles landfill.

Carla asked if losing the paper was a big deal.

“Not really,” I said. “It’s just a hassle, that’s all. I’ll have to send all the bitcoins from the Trezor to an online wallet, reinitialize the Trezor, generate a new word list, and put the bitcoins back on the Trezor. It would only be bad if I couldn’t remember my PIN, but I know it. It’s 551445.”

The Forgetting:

I 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 care to enter the digits correctly this time.

Wrong PIN entered.

Uh oh. I tried a slight variation: 554445

Wrong PIN entered.

This is ridiculous, I thought. I knew the PIN. I’d entered it at least a dozen times in recent months without having to refer to the paper. OK, it’s probably 554145.

Wrong PIN entered.

I looked at the tiny monochrome display on the bitcoin wallet and noticed that a countdown timer had appeared. It was making me wait a few seconds before I could try another PIN. My heart fluttered. I went to the hardware wallet manufacturer’s website to learn about the PIN delay and 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 Trezor’s memory. This means that power cycling the Trezor won’t magically make the wait time go to zero again. The best you can do by turning the Trezor on and off again is make the timer start over again. The thief 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 problem was, I was the thief, trying to steal my own bitcoins back from my Trezor. I felt queasy. After my sixth incorrect PIN attempt, creeping dread had escalated to heart-pounding panic—I might have kissed my 7.4 bitcoins goodbye.

I made a few more guesses, and each time I failed, my sense of unreality grew in proportion to the PIN delay, which was now 2,048 seconds, or about 34 minutes. I opened my desktop calculator and quickly figured that I’d be dead before my 31st guess (34 years). One hundred guesses would take more than 80 sextillion years.

I broke the news to Carla. I told her I couldn’t remember the PIN and that I was being punished each time I entered an incorrect PIN. She asked me if I’d saved the PIN in my 1Password application (a secure password app). I told her I hadn’t. When she asked me why, I didn’t have an answer.

I knew it would be a mistake to waste a precious guess in my agitated condition. My mind had become polluted with scrambled permutations of PINs. I went into the kitchen to chop vegetables for a curry we were making for dinner. But I couldn’t think of much else besides the PIN. As I cut potatoes into cubes, I mentally shuffled around numbers like 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 to the office. The Trezor still had a few hundred seconds left on the countdown timer. I did email until it was ready for my attempt. I tapped in 55144545.

Wrong PIN entered. Please wait 4,096 seconds to continue…

I 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 wasn’t so much the $8,000 that bothered me—it was the shame I felt for being stupid enough to lose the paper and forget the PIN. I also hated the idea that the bitcoins could increase in value and I wouldn’t have access to them. If I wasn’t able to recall the PIN, the Trezor would taunt me for the rest of my life.

The Search:

That morning, bleary eyed, I started looking into ways to get my bitcoins back that didn’t involve recalling my PIN or recovery words. If I’d lost my debit card PIN, I could contact my bank and I’d eventually regain access to my funds. Bitcoin is different. No one owns the bitcoin transaction network. Instead, thousands of computers around the world run software that validates the system’s transactions. Anyone is allowed to install the bitcoin software on their computer and participate. This decentralized nature of the bitcoin network is not without consequences—the main one being that if you screw up, it’s your own damn problem.

I went to /r/TREZOR/ on Reddit and posted:

Feel free to ridicule me—I deserve it. I wrote my PIN code and recovery seed on the same piece of paper. I was planning to etch the seed on a metal bar and hide it, but before that happened my housecleaning service threw the paper away. Now I can't remember my password and I have tried to guess it about 13 times. I now have to wait over an hour to make another guess. Very soon it will be years between guesses. Is there anything I can do or should I kiss my 7.5 bitcoins away?

Most of the replies were sympathetic and unhelpful. One person said I should get in touch with Wallet Recovery Services, which performs brute-force decryption on encrypted Bitcoin wallets. I emailed them and asked for help. “Dave Bitcoin” replied the next day:

I would like to help you ... but I do not see any solution to your problem. You need to either guess your PIN correctly, or find your seed.

A response on the Reddit forum from a user with the handle zero404cool was intriguing:

…all your information is still stored inside Trezor and there are people who know how to get all the information that is needed to get your wallet working again. I have seen it.

He added in another post:

Just keep your Trezor safe. Don't do anything with it. There is no need to try different PIN codes. You can regain possession of all your bitcoins.

The other users on the subreddit thought zero404cool wasn’t on the level. One said he might be a scammer; another accused him of spreading “FUD” (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) about Trezor’s security. I was inclined to agree with them, especially after reading about the lengths Trezor had gone to to make its device impenetrable to hackers. The manufacturer claimed with confidence that the Trezor could withstand any attempt to compromise it. The most obvious way to crack it, by installing unofficial firmware designed to unlock the PIN and keywords, would only have the effect of wiping the Trezor’s storage, the website said.

To confirm, I emailed Trezor and explained my predicament. A customer service representative emailed me back with a link to its “emergency situations guide,” none of which applied to my emergency situation. She wrote:

In all these situations there is either a PIN code or recovery seed needed to get an access to your funds. Unfortunately, without knowledge of at least one of these, no one is able to get access to this particular account with the funds stored on it. Is there anything else I can help you with, Mark?

The situation was starting to feel hopeless. In the meantime, zero404cool sent me a direct message on Reddit offering to help:

Yes, I can help you if you are willing to accept my help. Obviously, you are not going to find these instructions anywhere online. And it requires certain technical skills to complete them properly. A professional can extract all information just in 10 seconds. But this is not public knowledge, it's never going to be.

The problem is that I don't know you. I don't know if your story is real or not. I don't even know if you are a real person who really owns a Trezor. For example, You could as easily ask this to hack into someone else’s device. I can't allow that.

So, for this to work we have to gain each other’s trust I guess.

I wrote back and told zero404cool to Google my name, to help him decide if he could trust me. He’d see that I was one of the first editors of Wired, coming on board in 1993. I founded the popular Boing Boing website, which has 5 million monthly unique readers. I was the founding editor-in-chief of the technology project magazine, Make. A while later, zero404cool replied:

Hi Mark, It seems that you are not afraid of soldering and command line programs. I guess we can proceed with this recovery as DIY project then? I am somewhat busy at the moment; I hope that you are not in too much hurry to complete it?

I replied that I wasn’t in a hurry. I didn’t hear from him after that.

The Hypnotist:

“The hypnosis allows us to open all channels, all information,” Michele Guzy said. I was in a reclining chair in her Encino office, covered in a blanket, concentrating on her soothing patter. My wife, a journalist and editor, had interviewed Michele a few years ago for an article about hypnotism in movies, and I was so desperate to recall my PIN that I made an appointment with her.

Earlier in the session, Michele had me reenact the experience of writing my PIN on an orange piece of paper. She put the paper in her desk drawer and had me sit down and open the drawer and look at the paper. She explained that we were trying different techniques to trigger the memory of the PIN.

The exercises didn’t cause anything to surface to my conscious mind, but Michele told me that we were just priming my subconscious for the upcoming hypnosis portion of my appointment. She dimmed the lights and spoke in a pleasantly whispery singsong patter. She asked me to imagine going down a long, long escalator, telling me that I would fall deeper and deeper into a trance as she spoke. The ride took at least 15 minutes. I felt relaxed—but I didn’t feel hypnotized. I figured I should just go with it, because maybe it would work anyway.

After nearly four hours in her office, I decided the PIN was 5514455.

It took me a few days to build up the nerve to try it. Every time I thought about the Trezor my blood would pound in my head, and I’d break into a sweat. When I tried the number, the Trezor told me it was wrong. I would have to wait 16,384 seconds, or about four and a half hours, until the device would let me try to guess again.

The Final Guess:

I tried to stop thinking about bitcoin, but I couldn’t help myself. To make matters worse, its price had been climbing steeply over the summer with no end in sight. That July, the eccentric software entrepreneur John McAfee tweeted that a single bitcoin would be worth more than $500,000 in three years—“if not, I will eat my dick on national television,” he said, with typical understatement. I didn’t actually believe the price would rise that spectacularly (or that McAfee would carry out his pledge), but it fueled my anxiety.

I couldn’t escape the fact that the only thing keeping me from a small fortune was a simple number, one that I used to recall without effort and was now hidden in my brain, impervious to hypnotism, meditation, and self-scolding. I felt helpless. My daughters’ efforts to sneak up on me and say, “Quick, what’s the bitcoin password?” didn’t work. Some nights, before I went to sleep, I’d lie in bed and ask my brain to search itself for the PIN. I’d wake up with nothing. Every possible PIN I could imagine sounded no better or worse than any other. The bitcoin was growing in value, and it was getting further away from me. I imagined it as a treasure chest on a TRON-like grid, receding from view toward a dimly glowing horizon. I would die without ever finding it out.

Culled from wired.

via Blogger http://ift.tt/2ilp5ES

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courtneyvbrooks87 · 7 years

Text

‘I Forgot My PIN’: An Epic Tale of Losing $30,000 in Bitcoin

The Trezor: January 4, 2016: 7.4 BTC = $3,000

In January 2016, I spent $3,000 to buy 7.4 bitcoins. At the time, it seemed an entirely worthwhile thing to do. I had recently started working as a research director at the Institute for the Future’s Blockchain Futures Lab, and I wanted firsthand experience with bitcoin, a cryptocurrency that uses a blockchain to record transactions on its network. I had no way of knowing that this transaction would lead to a white-knuckle scramble to avoid losing a small fortune.

By November, bitcoin’s value had nearly doubled since January and was continuing to increase almost daily. My cryptocurrency stash was starting to turn into some real money. I’d been keeping my bitcoin keys on a web-based wallet, but I wanted to move them to a more secure place. Many online bitcoin services retain their customers’ private bitcoin keys, which means the accounts are vulnerable to hackers and fraudsters (remember the time Mt. Gox lost 850,000 bitcoins from its customers’ accounts in 2014?) or governments (like the time BTC-e, a Russian bitcoin exchange, had its domain seized by US District Court for New Jersey in August, freezing the assets of its users).

The Mistake: March 16, 2017: 7.4 BTC = $8,799

Jane, if anything happens, show this paper to Cory. He’ll know what to do with it. Love, Dad

I took the paper into Jane’s bedroom, stuck it under her pillow, and we took a Lyft to LAX.

The Garbage: April 4, 2017: 7.4 BTC = $8,384

I went into her room and looked under her pillow. It wasn’t there. I looked under her bed, dragging out the storage boxes to get a better view, using my phone as a flashlight.

“Carla?” I asked. “Did you see that orange piece of paper with my bitcoin password on it? I can’t find it in Jane’s room.”

“Maybe Jane put it in her desk,” she said. Jane was in school, but I texted and asked her. She said she never saw an orange piece of paper.

“Wait,” Carla said. “We had the house cleaned while we were gone. I’ll call them.”

Carla called the cleaning service we’d used and got the woman who cleaned the house on the line. She told Carla that she did indeed remember finding the orange piece of paper.

“Where is it?” Carla asked.

“I threw it away.”

Carla asked if losing the paper was a big deal.

The Forgetting: April 4, 2017: 7.4 BTC = $8,384

I 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 care to enter the digits correctly this time.

Wrong PIN entered.

Uh oh. I tried a slight variation: 554445

Wrong PIN entered.

This is ridiculous, I thought. I knew the PIN. I’d entered it at least a dozen times in recent months without having to refer to the paper. OK, it’s probably 554145.

Wrong PIN entered.

Wrong PIN entered. Please wait 4,096 seconds to continue…

The Search: April 5, 2017: 7.4 BTC = $8,325

I went to /r/TREZOR/ on Reddit and posted:

Feel free to ridicule me—I deserve it. I wrote my PIN code and recovery seed on the same piece of paper. I was planning to etch the seed on a metal bar and hide it, but before that happened my housecleaning service threw the paper away. Now I can’t remember my password and I have tried to guess it about 13 times. I now have to wait over an hour to make another guess. Very soon it will be years between guesses. Is there anything I can do or should I kiss my 7.5 bitcoins away?

I would like to help you … but I do not see any solution to your problem. You need to either guess your PIN correctly, or find your seed.

A response on the Reddit forum from a user with the handle zero404cool was intriguing:

…all your information is still stored inside Trezor and there are people who know how to get all the information that is needed to get your wallet working again. I have seen it.

He added in another post:

Just keep your Trezor safe. Don’t do anything with it. There is no need to try different PIN codes. You can regain possession of all your bitcoins.

The situation was starting to feel hopeless. In the meantime, zero404cool sent me a direct message on Reddit offering to help:

The problem is that I don’t know you. I don’t know if your story is real or not. I don’t even know if you are a real person who really owns a Trezor. For example, You could as easily ask this to hack into someone else’s device. I can’t allow that.

So, for this to work we have to gain each other’s trust I guess.

I replied that I wasn’t in a hurry. I didn’t hear from him after that.

The Hypnotist: May 25, 2017: 7.4 BTC = $12,861

After nearly four hours in her office, I decided the PIN was 5514455.

The Final Guess: August 12, 2017: 7.4 BTC = $28,749

Carla and I were folding laundry in the evening when Sarina came in. She was home from college for the summer. “I know what the bitcoin password is!” she said. “It’s 55445!”

“Why do you think that?” I asked.

“Well, you sometimes use 5054 as your password, but since the Trezor doesn’t have a zero, you would have just skipped it and put nothing there. You wouldn’t have made it 5154, you would have just used 554, and added 45 to it.” (I sometimes append my passwords with 45 because the number has a meaning to me.)

Carla looked at me and said, “Your eyes have a spark. Maybe it is the number.” I thought she might be right.

Sarina said, “If it isn’t 55445, then it’s 554455, because sometimes you add 455 at the end of your passwords.”

“That could be it,” I said. “I’ll think about it overnight and if I like it, I’ll try it tomorrow.”

In the morning, I decided that I’d try the numbers. I felt better about them than any other numbers I could think of. I plugged the Trezor in. I had to wait 16,384 seconds, or about four and a half hours, before I could enter the PIN. It was a Sunday, so I did things around the house and ran a couple of errands.

Once the Trezor was ready, I asked Carla, Sarina, and Jane to gather around my computer with me. I wanted them for moral support, to make sure I entered the PIN correctly, and to share in the celebration with me if the PIN happened to be right.

I sat in the chair while Jane, Sarina, and Carla stood around me. My heart was racing so hard that I could hear my head throb. I tried to keep my breathing under control. I entered the PIN slowly. Each time I entered a digit, I waited for one of my family members to confirm that I got it right. After entering 55445, I hovered the mouse cursor over the Enter button on the Trezor website. “Ready?” I asked. They all said OK. I clicked it.

Wrong PIN entered. Please wait 32,768 seconds to continue…

“Ah, shit,” I said.

“That’s OK, Daddy,” Sarina said. “When can we try 554455?”

I opened my calculator.

“Nine hours.”

Carla put her hand on my shoulder. “If it doesn’t work after a few more guesses, you should just break it,” she said. That seemed like the right thing to do. It would soon get to the point where I would have to keep the Trezor plugged into a powered-on computer for months (the countdown starts all over again if you unplug it), and then years and decades. The house we live in has lost power from a tripped circuit breaker, rain, or DWP maintenance at least once a year since we moved in 10 years ago. I could buy an uninterrupted power supply to keep the Trezor juiced during its years-long countdown, but I wanted this to be over, and killing the Trezor would end it.

The next morning before breakfast, I went into the office by myself and tried 554455.

Wrong PIN entered. Please wait 65,536 seconds to continue…

The Email: August 16, 2017: 7.4 BTC = $32,390

Awareness of my forgotten PIN had become something like tinnitus—always in the background, hard to ignore, annoying. What was wrong with my brain? Would I have remembered the PIN if I was in my 20s or 30s? I was feeling sorry for myself when I saw an email from Satoshi Labs, manufacturer of the Trezor, arrive in my inbox.

The subject line read, “TREZOR Firmware Security Update 1.5.2.”

The email said that the update was meant to fix “a security issue which affects all devices with firmware versions lower than 1.5.2.” It went on to say:

In order to exploit this issue, an attacker would have to break into the device, destroying the case in the process. They would also need to flash the device with a specially crafted firmware. If your device is intact, your seed is safe, and you should update your firmware to 1.5.2 as soon as possible. With firmware 1.5.2, this attack vector is eliminated and your device is safe.

Could there be a vulnerability in Trezor’s bulletproof security, one that I could take advantage of? I went to r/TREZOR to see what people were saying about it. The first thing I found was a link to a Medium post by someone who said they knew how to hack the Trezor using the exploit mentioned in the email. The post was titled “Trezor — security glitches reveal your private keys!”

The author included photos of a disassembled Trezor and a screengrab of a file dump that had 24 key words and a PIN. The author also included a link to custom Trezor firmware but no instructions on how to use it. I read the article a couple of times before I looked at the author’s name: Doshay Zero404Cool. It was the same person I’d corresponded with on Reddit five months earlier! I went to look at my old private messages with zero404cool and discovered..

http://ift.tt/2gLntnx

#IFTTT #Cryptocurrency and Bitcoin

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