This Reddit user lost access to his Bitcoin wallet for 7 yrs after a single typo, 2 days back he recovered it after thousands of attempts.

https://i.redd.it/n9pd61dgm7bg1.jpeg

20 Comments

  1. nice story. I will never forget password or seed phrase for my physical platinum. Nor will it burn in fire and it’s tangible, has intrinsic value and today you’d never buy 300000 ounces of platinum while you can buy million of bitcoins if you want. Truth is – platinum is much rarer than Bitcoin in terms of real physical availability. So I am sticking with platinum 

  2. ARoundForEveryone on

    Generational wealth built upon typos and the lack of backups. Not your keys, not your money. I get it. But sometimes….your keys, still not your money.

  3. Different_Counter113 on

    Because no site ever makes you put the password in twice when setting it. Explains everything!

  4. I usually call Bitcoin Support and they sort this out for me immediately. 😅😂

    Thousands of attempts in 7 years sounds slow though. Assuming each character can only have about 10 variations (surrounding keys, caps, no caps) your wordlist can’t be that long?

  5. It’s really dumb to make a system that lets you set up a password without confirming it for this very reason. doing the same type 2 times in a row is possible but very unlikely

  6. Diamond hands and so happy for the user but honestly this is a perfect example why Crypto struggles and will to be adopted much wider to an everyday thing for the average person.

    Your bank account you can still gain access if you lose your password and get your funds…

  7. A couple years back, I helped a random dude online with his seed phrase when he made a mistake. I tried to help him abstractly for a while, but nothing worked. He had multikey authentication and he thought he did the set up wrong . Eventually, he just gave me his seed phrases and said good luck.

    I noticed the same word appeared in both passphrases in the same position (for the two accounts controlling his crypto)…and figured the odds of that randomly happening were very low.

    I tried substituting the word with other words from the list that sounded similar…and if that failed, just running through the entire list for both passphrases. Well, the first word I tried worked.

    I could’ve taken everything he had. It was only about $2k at the time. But I’m a goody two shoes and let him know how he screwed up. I figured that’s my good deed for the year.

  8. Congrats on the forced long term gains! You kept yourself from blowing your diamond sized load before it could amass its potential.

  9. DontGiveMeGoldKappa on

    hm, i thought only the words in the bip list worked for creating a wallet, how is a typo on a word allowed? unless the typo made another word in the list? and what about cap locks? shouldnt matter, no?