Many of us have stories of lost bitcoin. It sucks, and we know the healthy thing to do is move on, but the more "number go up" the harder those memories hit. How much would those sats be worth today? Is there anything I could have done differently? Is there anything I could do now to get them back?
My story involves a Samourai wallet on an Android phone in late 2017. I was working a dead-end retail job and killing time playing around with Samourai and Bisq. I had my seed words on paper and I was playing around with a small amount; what could possibly go wrong?
One day the phone (mostly) died, and I figured a factory reset would squeeze some extra life out of it. I could restore the wallet from the seed words, so no problem there. One reset and 12 words later, no transactions found 💀
I replaced the phone a few months later, but held onto it in case I had a eureka moment and figured out how to recover my lost bitcoin. Every once in a while I'd go down the research rabbit hole in an effort to find a solution, but the closest I ever got was some forum mentions that Samourai, at the time, used some non-standard witchcraft in their app which made it impossible to restore to any other app or wallet software. Oof, I guess that corn is gone forever. But I just couldn't bring myself to get rid of that phone or the paper with the seed words on it. And those objects continued to taunt me ever time I saw them.
And now the story has reached it's end. The phone is going to be recycled, and the paper thrown out. Because this afternoon, while 1/2 way through a bottle of French rosé, I MANAGED TO RESTORE THE WALLET!
I had suspected there was a BIP39 passphrase involved, but none of the usual suspects I'd tried had worked. I'd made lists of every password I could think of and tried them all. But today, for whatever reason (maybe French rosé reasons?) a password half-way down my list worked.
It's not an earth-shattering amount of bitcoin, but the emotional weight of solving the mystery and un-derping a big derp has been lifted. I think I'll celebrate with some more rosé while I watch the mempool and will the transaction fees to drop below 100 sat/vB 😅
digidoc / Taylor P.
npub1kw…zusa4
2023-12-17 02:35:27
Author Public Key
npub1kw893e70hve5ymc8kxr75d8m9wcuaaasqzn37xvea6l4f39q04fs7zusa4Published at
2023-12-17 02:35:27Event JSON
{
"id": "3f0d2036395e37d8ecc43f95c90d240d73f209a12b6fbe3cfe8106e6cae6f869",
"pubkey": "b38e58e7cfbb33426f07b187ea34fb2bb1cef7b000a71f1999eebf54c4a07d53",
"created_at": 1702780527,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [],
"content": "Many of us have stories of lost bitcoin. It sucks, and we know the healthy thing to do is move on, but the more \"number go up\" the harder those memories hit. How much would those sats be worth today? Is there anything I could have done differently? Is there anything I could do now to get them back?\n\nMy story involves a Samourai wallet on an Android phone in late 2017. I was working a dead-end retail job and killing time playing around with Samourai and Bisq. I had my seed words on paper and I was playing around with a small amount; what could possibly go wrong?\n\nOne day the phone (mostly) died, and I figured a factory reset would squeeze some extra life out of it. I could restore the wallet from the seed words, so no problem there. One reset and 12 words later, no transactions found 💀\n\nI replaced the phone a few months later, but held onto it in case I had a eureka moment and figured out how to recover my lost bitcoin. Every once in a while I'd go down the research rabbit hole in an effort to find a solution, but the closest I ever got was some forum mentions that Samourai, at the time, used some non-standard witchcraft in their app which made it impossible to restore to any other app or wallet software. Oof, I guess that corn is gone forever. But I just couldn't bring myself to get rid of that phone or the paper with the seed words on it. And those objects continued to taunt me ever time I saw them.\n\nAnd now the story has reached it's end. The phone is going to be recycled, and the paper thrown out. Because this afternoon, while 1/2 way through a bottle of French rosé, I MANAGED TO RESTORE THE WALLET!\n\nI had suspected there was a BIP39 passphrase involved, but none of the usual suspects I'd tried had worked. I'd made lists of every password I could think of and tried them all. But today, for whatever reason (maybe French rosé reasons?) a password half-way down my list worked.\n\nIt's not an earth-shattering amount of bitcoin, but the emotional weight of solving the mystery and un-derping a big derp has been lifted. I think I'll celebrate with some more rosé while I watch the mempool and will the transaction fees to drop below 100 sat/vB 😅",
"sig": "d34705ddea354c568ffde928ea92428b16e505baa9c6d6921b8eef26bf0824f1774260e6273eba9415694cfaaa61e8194f5fa12a9cfb68ba11349fa2c228a525"
}