Once upon a time, far away, but not long ago, one Bitcoin hodler had held his sats for many years, throughout bull and bear cycles, never selling - just stacking.
He never trusted software keys - thus was using only hardware wallets. He never trusted a single vendor - thus was using only multisigs. He did only air gapped setups, to prevent leaking any information - and he had metal backups of his seed words.
One day a new air gapped hardware wallet had appeared on the market - with beautiful golden engravings and bitcoin signs all around. Instead of using chips (which can’t be trusted) it was using elaborate mechanical puzzle construction to compute addresses and signatures - and expose them as golden QR codes on its surface.
He decided he needed to set up a new multisig with this device - and move all his funds on it, for them to be held in a much more secure and cold way.
He sent some sats to the new multisig first - to test it - and sent them back. It all worked well. Thus he did a new transaction, spending all his existing sats - and paying them as to a thousand new outputs, all under the new multisig. Everything went smoothly, except…
The new key, returned by the new device, was unspendable - and our hodler was doing 6-of-6 multisig. He didn’t know that complex device mechanics were a puzzling trap, and once the first successful payment was done the device had changed its inner configuration to generate only unspendable keys.
He sent his transaction - but he put a high fee for it since he knew that blockspace was filled with some ordinal and inscription spam. The transaction got mined instantly - a new block had appeared within several seconds.
The luck wasn’t without holder today: he didn’t know that the new multisig was unspendable. He kept stacking for many more years, and most of his transactions got buried under years and years of new blocks ...
... until one day, when bitcoin hit 10m and he urgently needed some money to have an emergent surgery for one of his kids he discovered that he was fooled by the box.
He tried to increase the fees for at least the last transactions which he did just a few days ago - pitting them higher and higher until most of the output values were going into fees - but that price was still too small to force the miners to re-org.
His sats now remain chained to the old blocks forever - buried under so much PoW that it will be unprofitable to do such a deep re-org which can return his original transaction back.
The poor bitcoiner got mad and stayed in his room till the end of his days, trying to manually solve the puzzle and find a combination returning a private key for the public keys generated by the box.
