Researchers crack 11-year-old password, recover $3 million in bitcoin

boem@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 455 points –
Researchers crack 11-year-old password, recover $3 million in bitcoin
arstechnica.com
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Still looking for that backup of that disk with my bitcoin wallet from the early days... sadly probably gone forever.

That's why you gotta laminate your seed phrase, at the very least. And put it somewhere where it will stay for a very long time and that you'll remember (maybe hidden in a certain book, or put a false bottom in a drawer, I dunno get creative). Doesn't matter what you have or don't have on a disk, the Bitcoin isn't on the disk, it was the words you should be protecting.

This was when BTC was like 5 cents and no one had learned this lesson yet.

When I first acquired it, I wasn't aware of a place to even check it's value. There was this old game called Dragon Tales, where you could gamble whole BTC on things like kicking a coconut tree to see if 0-4 BTC worth of coconuts would fall...

I just store it in my keepass file, lol

I chuck a backup of stuff in my storage for that reason. Even if my house burns down I'll still be OK with those backups.

Honestly even lamination isn’t great. Won’t survive a fire.

Best options I’ve seen are engraving your seed into metal, and/or putting multiple copies in trusted locations like family houses or safety deposit boxes.

Last time I tried to engrave my seed on metal I got kicked out of the park.

In retrospect, the monkey bars were a poor choice for metal.

How come everyone is forgetting the best practices in Bitcoin backup?

You put the stuff in a container, put it in a hole in your yard, and put a birdbath on top of it.

The birdbath is a crucial security step! Standard practice! Been that way for years! I frankly can't believe a lot more people don't know about it.

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