A Redditor has warned “cocky” HODLers after losing the password to his crypto wallet for not acting carefully enough.
A bitcoiner by the username Onnar announced that he had lost access to 2.6 Bitcoin (BTC) – around $ 96,400 at the time of publication – when he tried to transfer a wallet to a new computer that was running over the holidays was bought. The user claimed to have formatted his old system’s drive without checking that the password manager still contained the password needed to access the private keys.
“I’m going to my password manager to get it and … it’s not there,” Onnar said. “A BTC password is nowhere to be found. I spend the next 30 minutes checking again but it’s not there. “
The Redditor admits that the error is “100% my fault” for not confirming that the files can be decrypted before wiping the hard drive. Onnar suspects that the password was copied to the password manager but not automatically saved.
“I’ve been looking through all of my remaining disk files and notes for the past week and a half. The password is nowhere to be found.”
Many Reddit users agreed to Onnar’s plight and responded with stories of their own crypto failures. Redditor notmattdamon1 said he had “similarly lost a lot less” and was mad at himself for weeks.
Others gave advice on how to avoid similar accidents in the future. “The standard now is to use a hardware wallet and write the seeds on paper and on a metal plate,” said bjman22. “The standard is not to encode your source words in a computer file for very good reasons.”
Unfortunately, crypto errors are quite common. Last year, Goldbug and Bitcoin critic Peter Schiff said he lost access to his crypto holdings after mistaking the pen on his wallet for his password.
Just before the holidays, a Chainlink user accidentally sent $ 50,000 to a smart contract that didn’t support the token. However, he recovered 20% of his losses after the crypto community sent $ 11,000 through an Aavegotchi donation page.